It sounds like a recipe for marital disaster — and it was. Except there's a happy ending. A 44-year-old woman, Robin Rinaldi, had been with her husband since she was 26 years old, and she'd only slept with three men before him. Finding herself having a bit of a midlife crisis as she realized she might die only having bedded four men, Rinaldi got permission to sleep with as many men as she liked for the next year — and you gotta hear what happened next.
Rinaldi, who is now 50, told the New York Post:
I was craving seduction and sexual abandon. I was having a midlife crisis and chasing this profound, deeply rooted experience of being female.
She says it didn't help that her husband didn't want children, so at 44, she found herself childless and apparently not having much sex either. Not sure that having kids would have helped this situation, who doesn't get a bit bored with their sex life after 20 years of monogamy? Been there, girl.
But most of us wouldn't go to said hubby and ask if they could have an open marriage for a year. Or if we did, not too many would agree. But this hubby did! I suppose it helped that he too wanted to get out there and slip between a stranger's sheets.
Rinaldi wrote a book about her sexperiences, called The Wild Oats Project. She placed an ad on nerve.com looking for sexual partners, and surprise, surprise, she had 23 respondents in 24 hours. (What happened during that one hour no one responded? Everyone must have been asleep.)
She said she was looking for men aged 35-50 to help her "explore her sexuality" — which doesn't explain the 23-year-old she slept with, but hey, age is just a number.
By the end of the year, Rinaldi had slept with 12 men (and two women). You'd think this would be the point in the saga where she would crawl back to her husband (who was sticking with one woman, who was not his wife) with the realization that sex isn't everything, and that all that was out there was a bunch of douchwads.
But lo and behold, that's not the ending she got. In fact, she fell for a 30-something guy she'd started having sex with — and she and the guy ended up moving in together. Oh, don't worry, her husband ended up with someone else, so it all worked out. Personally, I'm a bit shocked. Hooking up with a younger guy via an online booty call ad does not usually lead to domestic bliss, but … hey, if it worked for her!
Seems like this married couple could have spared each other all of this and just got divorced, since they were clearly not happy with each other. But then Rinaldi wouldn't have a book!
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If the comments on Rinaldi's YouTube video are any indication, she's going to take a lot of flack for this. But it's not like she snuck around like so many do — her husband knew everything that was happening. He even got his own fun in too. Got to give her credit for that.
Would you ever try this?
Embedded content: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfYMGjU9SWI
Image via Artem Furman/shutterstock