Learning how to ask for more

And interview with Molly Roden winter about nonmonogamy, rage, and motherhood

In Molly Roden Winter’s memoir More, she describes the process of opening up her marriage into nonmonogamy. The book is deeply personal and wonderfully insightful. It’s a book about sex and connections, which are sometimes passionate, sometimes awkward, but always a way for the author to ask for and demand more — of her sex life, of her relationships, and of herself.

As she struggles with the realities of nonmonogamy, Molly talks to her own mother and learns that her parents also had an open marriage. That realization, and the shame her mother carries, cause Molly to reflect on secrets and their power, and on the models of womanhood we are given by our mothers. Women are not supposed to be hungry, nor supposed to want more than the lives and families they have. But they do.

I spoke with Molly about sex, motherhood, and the power of asking for more. Her book More is out now and you should definitely read it.

LL: I think this book fits into the project of how we reimagine what good relationships look like. What surprised me was how much I related to it in a way that the title says about the way that we need more. We need more from our relationships, we need more from our society, we need more from our government, but we also need more for ourselves.

Molly: I felt like there were lessons that I had learned through this journey [with nonmonogamy] that applied to people who still prefer monogamy. For a long time, I preferred monogamy too, although I was very unhappy with it. And it didn't make sense to me because I was happy. I love my husband, I love my children. There was so much about my life I loved, and I just felt stuck. And I felt this lack of freedom and suffocation that I couldn't get my head around. How do I breathe? How do I become myself truly? And I didn't know how to do it within the confines of this marital family structure where I was taking care of the kids. And part of it is gender roles that I think are really breaking down now.

I had a very particular story that also felt very universal in terms of women my age and women my mother's age — perhaps even more. So getting this message that you can have it all — the lean in bullshit. And that if you're going to do all the things, including having a career and raising children and exercising. Michelle Wolf has a great bit on this bit that I love. Basically, at the end of a long list of everything a woman has to do, she's like, and sweetie, be sure to smile.

LL: My friends and I talk about it all the time. Even my friends who do not have children and are not currently partnered are also frustrated and overwhelmed which means they're super successful in their careers. It's just like, we have to do all this shit. Be hot on top of it, but not too hot. But yeah, it's like, it's too fucking much — and then smile.

Molly:  Yeah. It's too much. So I had all this rage, and I knew my mother had rage. She mentioned it to me. But she keeps forgetting. If I asked her today about it, she would say she didn’t remember. I said that it is this selective amnesia, and it was her defense mechanism, I'm sure. But now she has Parkinson's and she is forgetting.

But I believe that something happens when we don't investigate our rage and release it. Somehow it kills us. For me, it was migraines, and I still get migraines from time to time — but they were really becoming debilitating. And that was part of what was making me just pay attention to what was going on.

I don't really believe in accidents anymore, but in some ways, it was an accident that I met the Matt character. , who was the first relationship I had when we opened up our marriage. And in some ways, I feel like it was an important step that was destined to happen. Maybe it wouldn't have been him, maybe it would've been somebody else. I wasn't looking for it, but when it happened, it just hit me between the eyes. I want that.

But I still wanted my life. I wanted my husband, and I wanted my children, and I wanted that, and I didn't want to burn it down. I didn't want to burn down what I had.

I just read a Goodreads review — which I should never, ever do — and the reviewer was talking about how I clearly didn't want an open relationship. I kept asking for monogamy, and my husband was basically manipulative.  You can read the story that way, and I can't control that. But the way I think of it, looking back on that time now, 15 years past, what was really happening was I knew I needed something else, and I was kicking and screaming a little bit, and my husband never gave me an ultimatum. Honestly. Divorce was really never on the table for either of us, but there were still times where I freaking hated him.

LL: I hear people saying to me that they’re dissatisfied with their marriage but they don’t want to get a divorce. And I'm like, then I think you should ask for more. And I think a good relationship can handle that request.  But you have to be willing to do the scary thing. You have to be willing to ask for what you want, knowing that it could potentially break apart your life. And that is terrifying.

I think the model of a good relationship can expand and contract based on two people's needs. And if a marriage is not doing that, then it is not a good marriage.

Molly: Especially if your partner cannot join you in the project of evolution. You know what I mean? If there is a stagnation there or keeping the lid on yourself and your growth and a constriction. I'm not trying to proselytize people to open their marriage. I'm not proselytizing to stay married. I think the only thing I am proselytizing is exactly as you said — to look for more. I think you will find that the power to have more is within. And you can do that with a partner. You can do that without a partner. And it is very challenging because it's like a hermit crab having to shed a too-small shell and run naked on the beach with all the predators. It was very vulnerable and frightening.

But you have to do it sometimes.

LL: While reading your book I was thinking about the Oneida community,

Molly: Different, very different from what I'm doing.

LL: Absolutely. But when Sarah Vowell writes about them in her book Assassination Vacation she contrasts the Oneida community with restrictive puritanical America. And so she has this really beautiful image of thinking about the Oneida community watching a pot of water boil. And she implies that you have to find ways to let this steam out, otherwise you're going to explode. I think the scary thing is we're always looking for somebody else to let our steam out, but as you said, the power to change is within us.

Molly:  I thought also that my change was outside of myself. And so in some ways, this began because my husband was not making me happy, and so I was partly looking for someone else to make me happy. And they kept failing. Everybody was failing. Everything was failing to make me happy.

But I couldn't outsource my happiness.

LL: Which brings us to the sublimated rage that you were talking about, the migraine rage and your mother's rage. And I think that was so resonant to me. The rage we're dealing with in our culture is a lot of female rage after 2020. But that rage has been sublimated into Moms for Liberty or fizzled out. But it should lead to advocating for positive change in our lives.

Molly: I mean, that's a big reason why I wrote the book. I felt like I had figured something out, and not that I am some sort of guru or anything like that, but if you've lived 50 years — and I am legitimately now in a really good place. And I felt like I needed to give special permission to mothers to ask for more.

But I think one of the biggest things we deal with as mothers is this guilt. It's this idea that it's selfish to do something for yourself. My mother, who is very self-sacrificial, still feels shame about her open marriage. That's why she never told me, and she still uses the word “affair.” She showed me a very specific kind of femininity that was very self-sacrificial, and that was what she modeled. I only have sons, but I don't want to show my sons that this is what women will do for you.

I don’t want to show them that women will stay home and do whatever it is you need for them to do. I did show them that for a long time, but then I couldn't anymore. I just couldn't. And it's still hard.

You don't feel you have the right to be a whole person and to be a sexual being and to be all the things that you want to be. You don't feel like you're allowed to do that anymore. And I did it, not gracefully, but I did it, and I'm glad I did it. And I think my sons are going to be better partners because of it. 

LL: If we hide the truth from them about ourselves and the reality of life, that means they have to constantly reinvent the same wheel.

Molly: Like the Oneida metaphor as the steam valve. Why do we have to blow the lid off anything? Why don't we consciously remove the lid, put it away, and let ourselves steam away and be who we need to be and model full personhood without having to keep the lid on?

I still feel sometimes the mom's suit. I loved being a mother, but society's version of motherhood, the mom suit made me feel like I had to lop off an arm to fit in it. And it was awful. I didn't like the mom's suit, even though I loved motherhood.

LL: I feel that way all the time. I love being with my children, they're so fun. They're funny. They're interesting. We have a good time together. But being a mother sucks. Mothering them is great, but being a mother in public is this terrible thing because it's this onslaught of duties and expectations. You can't be sexual. You can't swear. You can't wear a crop top…

Molly: You can’t talk about the fact that you're suffocating and dying inside.

LL:  Yeah. And I was listening to another interview with Glennon Doyle, and she was talking to Celeste Ng, another lovely author. And some of her characters also experience a lot of rage and also have a hard time asking for what they need. And Glennon said women don't ask for what they need because they're so used to not having their needs met. So, if you ask for what you need, you're just setting yourself up for disappointment. And what I love about your book is you ask for what you need and then you go get it.

Molly: And it took me a while to even figure out what it was I really needed. I thought it was also important that I end the book at a place where a relationship had ended. And I've had other relationships that have come and gone in those five years since. But I wanted to end with a moment. The thing about memoir, you're choosing what to include, where to begin, where to end. And I wanted to end with myself, not entirely alone, because my husband is coming to pick me up. But also, still alone and in this place of realization that I do have what I need.

LL:  What do you think a good relationship looks like now to you?

Molly:  Rilke talks about love as two whole and complete humans honoring each other’s distinct selves.  And it's that communication, love and respect and love can mean so many different things, but I think it's actively caring for each other but honoring each other’s distinct wholeness. Because it's not melding into one.

I wanted these partnerships and relationships to be mine and to have plenty of solitude for myself built into the fabric of it.

LL:  Okay, I ‘ve been dancing around it. But let’s talk about sex. There's a huge orgasm gap in America. And your book is full of you having complicated, boring, and amazing sex. And I thought it was powerful that you were going out and you were getting your very sexual needs met, but also it was changing how you and your husband had sex, because you were both now having these experiences.

Molly: Yes, there's a lot of sex in the book, but it's a lot of bad sex in the first half.

Also, for me and a lot of women, we were taught that all sex is kind of an obligation that men will get. I grew up thinking blue balls was real. I really did. I mean, it's embarrassing now, but all the way through college, I thought blue balls was this horrible, painful thing I could do to a man.  

But eventually, I realized, sex is not a community service. I don’t have to have sex with every man who wants to have sex with me.

LL: But I don't think it's an accident when we feel this way. We teach women that we have an expiration date on our looks, on our reproductive functions. And we have a culture that says when you're dried up, nobody wants you. When you're old, nobody wants you. If you're fat, nobody wants you. If you have gray hair, nobody wants you. And actually the opposite is true.

Molly:  I don't want to call it a myth. I also think that I have friends who have a much lower libido or vaginal dryness or things like that. But I also think that because of the kind of sexual exploration I did and the discoveries of how my mind and my soul have to be cared for my body to show up, I now don't have bad sex because I won't have bad sex.

Now, I will only have connected sex with people that care for me and know how to please me.