I have actually heard about many marriages that were ‘open’ and gave time periods where they could cheat on each other, without consequence. It supposedly makes the marriage stronger. For one woman named Robin and her husband, Mansfield, their trial period of an open marriage, didn’t end so well for them.
The Daily Mail reports:
A woman who negotiated a year-long ‘open marriage’ with the husband she’d been with for 17 years and took the chance to sleep with 12 strangers has opened up about her wild year.
Robin Rinaldi, 50, had always considered herself a ‘good girl’, but ended up being so transformed by what she referred to as her ‘wild oats project’ that she left her husband after the 12 months ended.
But during her year of abandon, she bedded ten men and two women, whom she picked up online, in bars and at sex classes.
She made the life-changing decision to pursue sex with other people in 2008 – and has written a book about her exploits called The Wild Oats Project.
Rinaldi described her relationship with Mansfield, a brewer and wine-maker, as ‘stuck in a rut’, adding that ‘our once-a-week sex life was loving, but lacked spontaneity and passion’.
But she decided to make the change after begging him for years to have a child with her, and finally realizing that he wouldn’t after he got a vasectomy.
Reliving the fraught decision in her book, she wrote: ‘I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers… If I can’t have one, I must have the other’.
Under the terms of her new deal, Rinaldi took out an apartment, where she lived from Monday to Friday and would bed her conquests.
But over the weekend she would go back to Mansfield, and the two would live as a married couple, without asking what the other had been doing while they were apart.
Initially, the two agreed not to sleep with mutual friends, get into any ‘serious’ relationships or have unprotected sex – but ultimately failed to stick to them.
Rinaldi wrote how she started out by posting an online ad, entitled Good Girl Seeks Experience. In the post, she wrote: ‘I’m a 44-year-old professional, educated, attractive woman in an open marriage, seeking single men age 35-50 to help me explore my sexuality.’
The next day, she had 23 offers, she recounted to the New York Post.
However, after the raucous year, Rinaldi admitted, she could not turn back.
Attempts to rekindle their marriage after the year failed – and Rinaldi began sleeping with one of the men from the past year, whom she refers to by a pseudonym.
Will any of you being trying this ‘open marriage’ method to help save your marriage? To purchase her book click here.
