Millionaire Park Slope author says she’s grateful for open marriage because husband can indulge his fondness for hurling foul-mouthed abuse in bed with other women instead of making her cry

An author who chronicled her public marriage in a tell-all memoir has spoken of her relief that her husband can now indulge his penchant for shouting obscenities in bed with other women – after admitting it made her cry.

Molly Roden Winter, 51, made the decision to resume her 10-year relationship with her husband in 2008 and laid out in painstaking detail the highs and lows of her arrangement in “More: A Memoir of Open Marriage.”

In her book, she recalls the moment she burst into tears when her husband Stewart, 56, called her a ‘c***’ during sex – before quickly reassuring her that he ‘didn’t mean any harm’.

During a recent appearance on the ‘Guys We Fcked’ podcast, the former English teacher revealed how the couple have different tastes in bed, claiming that she was ‘over the moon that she no longer felt the pressure to give him everything he wants. ‘

“My husband likes to shout, you know, obscenities during sex,” she said. “And some women love it, and I don’t. It makes me cry. And that’s a buzzkill. And he can tell I’m about to cry,” Winter explained.

“If he does it now, I don’t have to push my boundaries and I don’t feel bad about it because he can do that with whoever he wants, and I’m excited about it.”

The couple share two children and live in a $4.3 million brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope neighborhood.

On the podcast, Winter explained that she cSince settling down and having children, I feel more and more like a ‘whole person’.

“I felt more like the role of ‘mother’ than anything,” she said.

In the beginning I said, “I didn’t use that term open marriage, I certainly didn’t use the term polyamorous, because one of my initial rules was not to fall in love. I thought you had to avoid loving more than one person at all costs.”

The original title of her memoir was “The Experiment,” because “that’s what it felt like at first.”

“When we first started dating, I had very, very few partners and my husband had ruined the town,” the mother of two continued, adding that several of Stewart’s ex-girlfriends attended their wedding.

Even before their foray into polygamy began, Winter said her husband encouraged her to sleep with other people.

“There’s no way you’re going to be okay with just sleeping with me for the rest of your life,” she quoted the 56-year-old as saying.

And when she finally tied the knot — by flirting with a younger man at a bar — Winter experienced “desire” for the first time in a while, which many mothers don’t get, she claimed.

The author’s nonchalance seems to be at odds with her attitude throughout much of the book, which she spends in tears as she struggles with her husband’s sexual escapades.

Like a judgement summarizes it succinctly: “For every orgasm scene, there are three sobbing fits.”

When Winter talks about interacting with the younger man at the bar, Stewart eagerly encourages her to sleep with the stranger.

But when he asks permission to sleep with his ex-girlfriend Lena, Winter becomes upset.

“The thought of them together makes me feel like I’ve fallen to the bottom of a well,” she writes.

During Friday’s podcast appearance, the 51-year-old admitted that she was “in a bad place” with her husband’s girlfriend at the end of the book.

She slyly teased an upcoming book about her relationship with her husband’s girlfriend and her friend’s wife, saying she “ultimately learned, changed and evolved… thanks to these two women.”

“I was terrified that I wouldn’t be loved enough,” Winter admitted.

“And so the story is more of my discovery that I could love myself completely and therefore didn’t need constant reassurance that I was lovable.”

According to a September 2023 report from the Pew Research Center, half of Americans fully or partially disapprove of open marriages.

This includes 37 percent who say such arrangements are completely unacceptable and 13 percent who find them somewhat unacceptable.

The remainder of the population, an estimated one-third of Americans, say these marriages are somewhat or completely acceptable, while 16 percent are still unsure.

The same survey found that men are more likely than women to approve of open marriages, although the statistics are close: 36 percent versus 30 percent.

As for satisfaction rates in open relationships, a 2019 study from the University of Rochester provides a hint as to how things might play out.

The university’s Rogge Lab found that people in monogamous and consensual non-monogamous arrangements reported similarly low levels of loneliness and anxiety.

On the other hand, they revealed similarly high levels of satisfaction with relationships and sex.

When it came to people in partially open and one-sided non-monogamous relationships – that is, an arrangement where only one person has multiple partners – the findings were vastly different.

These people tended to be in younger relationships and reported lower levels of both commitment and affection.

Few in those cohorts reported feeling high sexual satisfaction. Moreover, of all groups studied, they appeared to have the highest percentages of unprotected sex with new partners.

“We know that communication is useful for all couples,” says Ronald Rogge, lead researcher at the lab.

He added that this is especially critical for couples entering non-monogamous relationships “in a culture dominated by monogamy.”

“Secrecy surrounding sexual activity with others can all too easily become toxic and lead to feelings of neglect, insecurity, rejection, jealousy and betrayal,” Rogge said.

It looks like winter has crossed that bridge.

“I thought, oh no, he’s not going to love me enough and he’s going to love someone else,” she said of her husband.

“But that’s ultimately what my journey ended up being. A discovery that I can’t outsource love, I can’t outsource my self-esteem, I can’t outsource my happiness.

“If I can’t give these things to myself, I’ll never have them. They will be transient.”