In Robin Rinaldi’s Wild Oats Project, the journalist says she suffered a mid-life crisis and convinced her husband of many years to consent to an open marriage experiment. Based upon the description given in her memoirs, the result did not end well for their marriage. While Rinaldi says she was chasing after a profound experience, some simply say “she is a slut and she is trying to make her self feel good about what she did.” But are comments like these accurate or so-called slut shaming?
Before Robin Rinaldi met her husband Scott at the age of 26, she admits she had sex with three other men. At age 44, Rinaldi was having a midlife crisis because her husband made it clear he did not want to ever have children by having a vasectomy. In response, she declared she didn’t want to “go to my grave with no children and four lovers. I refuse.”
“I was craving seduction and sexual abandon,” Rinaldi said according to The New York Post. “I was having a midlife crisis and chasing this profound, deeply rooted experience of being female.”
As a solution to this midlife crisis, Robin and Scott agreed to an open marriage where they would have different homes during the week, but would meet again during the weekends. The deal was that both could have sex with whomever they wanted, but were required to use sexual protection and would not discuss what happened in bed. These sexual experiments were also supposed to be limited to three dates in order to prevent any serious relationships from forming.
This is how Robin Rinaldi advertised her experiment when she started.
“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. You must be trustworthy, smart, and skilled at conversation as well as in bed.”
Within one day Robin had 23 responses, although she did not go crazy, instead limiting herself to 12 people, including two women, over a period of a year. She also experimented further by going on a so-called “sex friendly” yoga retreat in order to learn “orgasmic meditation.”
Unfortunately, this open marriage became too open when Scott began having sex for six months with the same much-younger woman, but that’s not what caused the divorce, since Scott broke off the tryst. It takes two to tango, and Robin also began meeting with one of the men she had met during her Wild Oats Project.
“[T]he open marriage spiced things up — at least at first. But, by the end of the 12-month project, moving back home full time proved more difficult than I had thought. After you open up a marriage and experience a whole range of sexual variety and aspects of yourself you’ve never had before, it’s hard to put everything back in the box.”
Having finished releasing the Wild Oats Project, Robin Rinaldi says she is “grateful I experienced my marriage to Scott,” but they are now divorced. For the past five years she has lived together with a man named Alden in what she calls a “regular, monogamous relationship.”
What do you think about this open marriage experiment now that you know how it ended?
