YouSaid · the spoken record

Molly Roden Winter

lines on the record: 34
first: 2024-08-23
most recent: 2024-08-23
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I don't have daughters, but I do talk to my friend's daughters who I want them to know, oh, no, life is long, honey. Like, you don't have to do anything now that you couldn't also then do when you're 50 or 60. So you can take your time finding yourself.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh wow, yeah, and I feel like, I mean, I can only, I'm at the very beginning of my fifties now, I'm fifty one, but boy, oh boy our fifties better than 40s and forties were better than 30. Like, just in terms of how much I know myself and confidence. And I'm really like, I'm willing to try anything as long as I feel excited by it. You know, if I don't feel excited, it's a no. And I just kind of like go through my life now deciding when things come up. Do I want to do this or not? If I'm excited, sure. There's a reason why I can't. And it's a great way to make decisions, not based on what anybody else might think. Or is this foolish? Is it foolish for a 51-year-old woman to do X, Y, or Z? I don't care. And I feel like it's more so important.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I know I'm learning things that are important, and I don't know how else to learn them. I'm sure there is another way, but this door is open and the lessons are just pouring over me. Why would I shut this off? And I could sense that there was some joy on the other side of the pain that was coming. And my mother was also there to tell me that that was true, having lived through open marriage and she was there saying, oh, sweetie, no, it's going to be fine. You and Stuart are not ending your marriage this way. And I just believed her. And this was back when I was asking for advice. But yeah, it was, you can't fix someone else's pain. You have to just go through it and keep your eyes open to what is the gift of this pain. There's always a gift of the pain in my belief.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She's got a lot of challenges, but she really does try to view everything that happens, even, you know, falling in the bathroom is an opportunity for her to learn something new about herself, right? Whether it's her resilience or her need to ask for help or whatever it is. And she really takes on each and every moment of life as kind of a spiritual journey, regardless of what is happening in a way that I really find admirable. So I think when people are looking for what should I do, they're often trying to find a way out of the pain that they're in. But sometimes the pain is part of it. Like I couldn't have, you can read the book, I think you feel there's a lot of pain along the way. And some people have asked, well, why did you stay in it? Why did you keep your marriage open if it was so painful? And it was because I was getting this sense I was getting this feeling that I'm learning things.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Based on everything we were just talking about, you have to look within for your own answers. I mean, I ask for advice very rarely now and usually just from my husband. I tend to talk about what I'm going through or quandaries I have, but I am much less likely to ask someone else what I should do than I was even ten years ago. And so I think there is a need for all of us to, you know, to be in community and conversation with our deepest truest selves, but ultimately then to realize nobody else can do this for you. And I love my mother's line about this. And this is partly, you know, I think another main thread of the book when she says everything is an opportunity to learn and to grow. And she really lives her life that way. She's got Parkinson's. She's in a wheelchair.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How did you know, Sarah? How did you know? Yeah, I've had to be just kind of discerning with it. And so people that I knew before the book came out who have reached out to me. I mean, I've had a college friend who I hadn't seen for 14 years. I mean, college was a lot longer than 14 years ago, but I hadn't seen her for 14 years, and now she's going through some stuff in her marriage. And so we went out a student that I had back in 2008, read the book, and wanted to meet for coffee. And so people like that, I will absolutely make time for. It's harder when people are DMing you on Instagram asking for advice. And I don't know this. So I've just kind of made the blanket decision to not respond to those because the need is endless. And so, and I can't, I can't possibly know what someone else should do. And that's part of just my own belief system, too, that it's like that.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But it was intoxicating, or you know, punching a heavy bag. I tend to be drawn to things that kind of pull me out of my comfort zone in order to really get me moving. But I think it can also be a return to yourself in so many ways, just making sure that you're spending time with the people that feed your soul and making sure you're spending time walking in nature or, you know, whatever it is to feel connected to yourself.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It was basically my boxing, the boxing gymnary we closed and it crossed the gym open. So I was like, guess I'm doing this now. But it's about the physicality. It's about being in my body and being in community too. I like the boxing class and I like CrossFit as like people come together and talk to each other. You don't just work out in isolation at a gym. And then the writing of the book and expressing myself that way more, I will be honest. I haven't written a lot of songs since I started working on the book. But it's all just part of the same thing. And it's that kind of endless road of self-discovery that you can travel and find ways that feed you. And as I said, it was in part the activity. It was in part doing something that scared me, like standing up and playing guitar and singing with, you know, on a stage.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, yes. And those things have shifted, you know, the things that I do to stay connected to myself have shifted over time. I do still play guitar, you know, just kind of do open mics and things like that. And I instead of boxing now, I've moved on to CrossFit. But it's still very physical.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I like to use the word self full as the opposite of self lists that we're taught to be self-lists, but who wants to be a person without a self And it's not good for anybody around you to just have this shell of a person. So yes, I like the idea of being self-full.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To patch the hole is to do it yourself. That's not all that helpful because I can't even tell you what the tools were or how to do it. It's a very individual thing, I think. But once, you know, part of it is just giving myself love and grace. And so that when I do get filled up, not saying that there aren't the occasional holes still. I'm still human. I still have my loaves. But I'm in such a better place in terms of feeling filled up and even if I'm not with my husband or with my children and your children leave, by the way, they are off and running. So it's like if you're just counting on your children to make you feel whole and happy, I got news for you. They're out the door at 19. They're back. They come back and forth. But it's just a very different thing to be able to hold yourself and to hold your own.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes Yeah, the whole Thank you, the hole of the bucket that was that feeling that maybe a lot of us have where, you know, one moment we can be feeling really good about ourselves. Maybe we've just had a really great, you know, dinner with an old friend or we had a particularly good day with our kids or a great date or something that made us feel really good. And then a day passes and then it all, you're like, wait, I feel like shit again. I was realizing how much I was outsourcing my happiness, how much I was looking outside of myself to get my own sense of self and my own self-esteem fed, that when other people told me they loved me or showed me they loved me or showed me they wanted me in some way, that I could feel good. And then it was my therapist who said, sounds like you have a hole in your bucket. You're filling it up and then it just drains out the bottom. And the only way.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Come home to myself and to understand, oh those parts that I've thought are just too shameful to even look at or acknowledge Now, they're just part of me, and it turns out they're part of every human being, and it's allowed me to my children, I think, to be their most free selves with me as well because they know I'm not going to freak out about things that seem bad, you know. They can be their whole selves and it's, I'm a safe person for them to bring their whole selves to. And I like that. So that's what we, the price we pay as mothers, if we're too much about like, oh, only show the good, only show the good. Your children feel that. Then your children inherit that from you. It's not a good way to move through the world, I think.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then it kind of festers, right? So I think there's something very healthy. One of the things I discovered, if you, you know, I was in therapy throughout the duration of the years I write about and more. And I was trying to explore with my therapist what is it that I want to do? And so he had me make this list of freedoms, things I want to be free to do and free to be and free from. And one of them was free to do stupid shit. I just didn't want to have to think through all the consequences all the time for everything I was going to do. I just wanted to act and then pick up the pieces later, which is not a great way to live your whole life. And it's good that I had some safety catches built in like my husband being like, what are you doing? Where are you going? But I needed to go through that in order to really come.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I believe that yeah, and I think there is something about, I've used the word shadow before, but like, you know, when we present ourselves to the world, and I think mothers are particularly, you know, think about your own mother, not everybody's mother, because I know I have friends, but for my own mother, she presented a face to the world that was very put together and not a lot that you could criticize her for, right? A very well-respected and respectable woman, which means that anything that didn't fit that, she pushed underground. And I did the same thing. And part of that is your own sexual desires. And as you said, the dirty bits and the things that are not network television appropriate, the things that you can't show you.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Got to go out and do what I wanted to do. And I still do in a way that feels like the biggest gift you can give a person you love.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“My husband or any of my partners, nor would I want my friends or my children to be on the cusp of doing something that's going to bring them joy and to say ah, no, I can't do it, Molly can't handle it. You know what I mean? I want the people I love to live, you know, in a way that has integrity and isn't just, you know, all bets are off, which I did. If you, you know, you read the first half of the book and you maybe the whole thing like, wow, a lot of poor decisions were made. And so I'm not holding myself up. But I feel like I moved through some of that in order to see now, I needed to do that. Thank God my husband just kind of stayed present to hold me loosely through it, right? Do you need me? Do you not need me? And there were bumps. It was difficult, but I had this amazing security behind me as I.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yes, I agree. And I'm not at all saying though, and I'm always trying to be careful. I'm not at all saying monogamy is doomed to failure. It's a mindset that honestly, you know, I see a plenty of unhealthy non-monogamous relationships too. So I think it's also important to say, you know, there are lots of things that can go wrong in non-monogamy where you're not caring for yourself, you're not caring for each of your partners the way they need to be cared for. It's much harder in many ways. It's not a way to, if you're failing at monogamy, I don't think you're suddenly going to be great at non-monogamous relationships. I think their relationship skills that we all need, which in part are not requiring another person to just give freedom to the person you love. You know, I wouldn't want.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bridge our partner to have relationships with the opposite sex, whereas if you are in a lesbian community, there's a joke among my lesbian friends that what do you call a lesbian's friend, an ex It's all just it's not such it's not such a thing of having to like shun someone from your life once you're romantically no longer involved. And there's something about our heterosexual dynamic because even open relationships are much more common in queer culture. And it's the straight people that are really needing to catch up, I think, in terms of just opening up our boundaries a little bit to allow for more dynamism and ultimately love in our lives. It doesn't have to be sexual romantic love, but just more.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's more, I think, as a culture, we're starting to see that this is not a healthy way that we're kind of siloed in our little families, our little nuclear families, and try to make our partner everything to us. But I think a lot of people, monogamous or nonmonogamous, are having the experience, especially during COVID perhaps, of like, whoa, this is pretty close quarters. I might need a wider net. I might need more people in my life in order to not feel so claustrophobic. And I think that's natural and beautiful. And it doesn't have to be sexual, but I think sometimes we do close ourselves off to even friendships with someone. In heterosexual, I should get real specific here too. In cis, you know, gendered heterosexual marriages, we don't encourage.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Your second child or your third child? What? How are you possibly going to love them? We don't put that on that relationship. And also, similarly with friends, I used to teach middle school and there were always these, you know, 12-year-old girls coming to me at lunch, crying because one of their best or their best friend had just, you know, made a new friend and it was a lot of trauma. And we would have to, you know, talk about it and work through it and this idea that it's okay to have more than one friend and you're, you know, you're not losing them. You're maybe gaining another friend or not, but you don't have to, you know, you're all allowed to make more than one friend. You don't have to hold on so tight. But we don't do that with our romantic relationships we have a lot more. It's more allowed to hold on tight.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think so. Regional variations do occur, but I think for a lot of us, we have been raised to believe that there is something very finite about romantic love, that we are in competition with one another for that romantic love and to be chosen as the one is the goal, right? We don't apply that same thinking generally to other relationships. Like we don't say, although it can come.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Very much so. And I think it's in part the way we conceive of romantic relationships in our culture, and I'll say our, because I think America and Britain has quite a bit of overlap for most of the Western world.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It is right. It makes me, yeah, right. But there are people who enjoy that. And so I also don't want to yuck their yum, you know what I mean?”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“His other relationships. I could then see I'm experiencing loving more than one person and it feels beautiful. It doesn't feel like I'm choosing. So I could then understand how he was feeling when he was in another loving relationship. And that is just continued to grow. And so I'm in a very different place now with my experience, which means I freely use the word polyamorous as well. But having an open marriage in a sexual way and being polyamorous can be two very, they don't always go together. Not everybody would identify as both, but I do.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It wasn't very fulfilling or satisfying to me to have just have casual sex and there are lots of other people and different relationship configurations where that might really work for them people for whom the sexual connections that they have outside of their marriage are the most important aspect and the relational or falling in love is not really what they're seeking. So it was also an individual path for me to discover, oh, this is what I want and still felt very frightening. But once I experienced falling in love with someone else and realized, oh, it doesn't actually make me love my husband less, if anything, it makes me love him more because we're giving each other these gifts. of being able to expand ourselves kind of without limits, it then allowed me to not have the same kind of fear and jealousy around him.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well interestingly, initially polyamory was not an identifier. I did not want to be polyamorous, and the way I what polyamory truly is loving more than one person. And that felt very dangerous to me early on when we embarked on opening our marriage. The idea was that it was going to be a way to explore sexually, but certainly not to actually have full relationships with other people and certainly not to fall in love. That was my key rule above all else. And it was primarily my rule that neither of us, my husband nor I, were supposed to fall in love, but as many people have pointed out, since that seems like an unrealistic rule. And indeed it was. And not just unrealistic, though. I discovered that what I wanted was actual full connection with other people.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Know when you think you're going and charting this new path for yourself only to discover that your mother already did it, it kind of takes the wind out of your sails, you know? I'm like, really? So we were already kind of on this path in an experimental way when I found out about my own parents. And it took me a while, though it really took the book for me to even talk to my father about it at all. So it's interesting how difficult it still is, you know, even as a 51-year-old woman to talk about myself or to even fathom my parents as sexual beings, but I think there is a lot of wisdom to share across generations that we're cutting ourselves off from. If we don't, if we're not willing to talk.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, yes. Yes, and my parents' case, they didn't have the language in part of open marriage. Not to say this was in the 70s and 80s that they had their heyday. They're still married now, by the way. They're in their 80s. And my father is always quipeing. That part of our life is over now. But it was an important part of their life for many years.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Indeed, I did, yes, yes. So my parents were in an open marriage. I don't know if you wanted to say more about it before I launched”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Has some, you know, what we kind of tend to shove to the shadows, things that we're not supposed to be as women and certainly not as mothers.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like something we have to hide or be ashamed of, that we can integrate other aspects of our being into especially for myself as a mother, I felt a lot of concern and I felt other people's concern about, oh no, what is this going to mean for your children? And as it turns out, my children are doing great. They're 22 and 19 now. And so that has also lowered the temperature for me in terms of my concern about what I'm doing. Do people know? It was my biggest fear that my children were going to find out and I was going to have to account for myself. And then, as you know, you read the book, the first of prologue that I open with that scene where my oldest finds out, which is, you know, kind of the midway point of the book, but I wanted to open with that scene in some ways because it's the central conflict, this how do I be a mother and a whole person at the same time, a person that has.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But to say yes, I am polyamorous, and this is part of who I am. And then I got the idea for the book in 2019 and I thought, oh, well, I can't do that. It came to me in a meditation, actually, that I was going to write this book or that I should write this book. And it's just been a series over those last five years since I first conceived of writing about my open marriage that I've shifted again and again and again as I have opened up more and more aspects of myself. And I'm so, you know, pleased on a level that's larger than myself about the reception that my book has gotten because I think it's about, as you said, it's about more than just having a relationship outside of my marriage or multiple relationships outside of my marriage. It's about allowing women to be their free whole selves and having that not feel like.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, it's a great question. And there is kind of an evolution is the best word I can think of that has, you know, happened to me. I'm part of it. I initiated it, but I also feel in some ways like I'm along for a ride whereby when we first opened our marriage, I had a lot of shame around it, I think it's fair to say. It felt wrong to be a sexual being outside of my marriage, to be doing something that felt kind of deviant. And it has taken me, you know, the last, it took the 10 years that more covers. The book covers the years from 2008 to 2018, which are the first 10 years of our open marriage. It took that long for me to actually embrace it as an identifier for myself, not my whole idea.”
2024-08-23 · Intelligence Squared · An Open Conversation About Marriage, with Molly Roden Winter · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT