Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project.” And not just the book. Get ready for “The Wild Oats Project” phenomenon — the debates, the think pieces, the imitators and probably the movie. Get ready for orgasmic meditation and the Three Rules. Get ready for “My Clitoris Deals Solely in Truth” T-shirts.
Robin Rinaldi, a magazine journalist living in San Francisco by way of Scranton, Pa., initially wasn’t sure she wanted children, but she knew that Scott, her stoic Midwestern husband, did not. Over time, Rinaldi decided a baby would add purpose to their lives, but Scott wouldn’t change his mind. “I wanted a child, but only with him,” she explains. “He didn’t want a child but wanted to keep me.” When Scott opted for a vasectomy, she demanded an open marriage.
“I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers,” she declares. “If I can’t have one, I must have the other.”
(Sarah Crichton)
If you’re wondering why that is the relevant trade-off, stop overthinking this. “The Wild Oats Project” is the year-long tale of how a self-described “good girl” in her early 40s moves out, posts a personal ad “seeking single men age 35-50 to help me explore my sexuality,” sleeps with roughly a dozen friends and strangers, and joins a sex commune, all from Monday to Friday, only to rejoin Scott on weekends so they can, you know, work on their marriage.
The arrangement is unorthodox enough to succeed as a story, and in Rinaldi’s telling it unfolds as a sexual-awakening romp wrapped in a female-empowerment narrative, a sort of Fifty Shades of Eat, Pray, Love. “I wanted to tell him to f— me hard but I couldn’t get the words out of my mouth” is a typical Rinaldi dilemma. At the same time, she constantly searches for “feminine energy” or her “feminine core” or for a “spiritual practice guided by the feminine.”
But more than empowering or arousing, this story is depressing. Rinaldi just seems lost. Still sorting through the psychological debris of an abusive childhood, she latches on to whatever guru or beliefs she encounters, and imagines fulfillment with each new guy. She still rushes to Scott whenever things gets scary (a car accident, an angry text message), yet deliberately strains their union beyond recovery. “At any cost” are the operative words of the subtitle.
Robin and Scott agree to three rules — “no serious involvements, no unsafe sex, no sleeping with mutual friends” — that both go on to break. He finds a steady girlfriend, while Robin violates two rules right away. “In truth, I was sick of protecting things,” she writes about going condom-free with a colleague at a conference. “I wanted the joy of being overcome.”
The men and women she hooks up with — some whose names Rinaldi has changed, others too fleeting to merit aliases — all blur into a new-age, Bay Area cliche. Everyone is a healer, or a mystic, or a doctoral student in feminist or Eastern spirituality. They’re all verging on enlightenment, sensing mutual energy, getting copious action to the sounds of tribal drums. The project peaks when she moves into OneTaste, an urban commune where “expert researchers” methodically stroke rows of bare women for 15 minutes at a time in orgasmic meditation sessions (“OM” to those in the know). “Everyone here was passionate,” Rinaldi writes. “Everyone had abandoned convention.”
But they are all so uniform in their unconventionality that it’s hard to keep everyone straight. This book needs an org chart.
Rinaldi holds little back, detailing her body’s reactions along the way. At first she is upset that she can’t feel pleasure as quickly as other women, but she finally decides she’s glad that her “surrender didn’t happen easily, that it lay buried and tethered to the realities of each relationship.” Her clitoris, although “moody,” was also “an astute barometer. . . . It dealt solely in truth.”
And truth often comes in tacky dialogue. “Your breasts are amazing,” one of her younger partners tells her. “You should have seen them in my twenties,” Rinaldi boasts. His comeback: “You’re cocky. I dig that.” (Fade to dirty talk.) When they do it again months later, he thanks her in the morning. “Something happens when I’m with you,” he says. “I feel healed.” I’m sure that’s exactly what he feels.
Rinaldi can’t seem to decide why she’s doing all this. The project is her “rebellion.” Or “a search for fresh, viable sperm.” Or a “bargaining chip.” Or “an elaborate attempt to dismantle the chains of love.” Or just a “quasi-adolescent quest for god knows what.”
If exasperation could give you orgasms, this book would leave me a deeply satisfied reader.
One of her oldest friends calls her out. “How is sleeping with a lot of guys going to make you feel better about not having kids?” she asks. Rinaldi’s answer: “Sleeping with a lot of guys is going to make me feel better on mydeathbed. I’m going to feel like I lived, like I didn’t spend my life in a box. If I had kids and grandkids around my deathbed, I wouldn’t need that. Kids are proof that you’ve lived.” It’s a bleak and disheartening rationale, as though women’s lives can achieve meaning only through motherhood or sex.
For all her preoccupation with feminine energy, Rinaldi seems conflicted over feminism. “I would die a feminist,” she writes of her collegiate activism, “but I was long overdue for some fun.” Later, she pictures women’s studies scholars judging her submission fantasies, and frets over “those Afghan women hidden under their burqas” who could be “beaten or even killed right now for doing what I was so casually doing.” But when she finds a sexual connection with a woman who backs away because of “emotional issues,” Rinaldi channels her inner alpha male: “I was drawn to her body but shrunk back when she expressed unfettered feeling. . . . It only took sleeping with one woman to help me understand the behavior of nearly every man I’d ever known.”
When the year runs out, Rinaldi returns to Scott, even though she soon starts an affair with a project flame. She’s no longer so upset about the vasectomy, regarding it as a sign that Scott can stand up for himself (though it may also mean she now cares less about him, period). No shock that post-project, their chemistry is off, and when Rinaldi makes a casual reference to their time apart, Scott finally explodes. “Do you know how many nights I cried myself to sleep when you moved out!?” he asks. “Do you care about anyone’s feelings but your own!?” She was “too stunned to reply.” But the fate of this marriage, revealed in the final pages, is anything but stunning.
“These are the sins against my husband,” Rinaldi recounts. “Abdicating responsibility, failing to empathize with him, cheating and lying.” After blaming him for so long, “in the end, I was the one who needed to ask forgiveness.”
In a rare moment of heartbreaking subtlety, the book’s dedication page simply says “For Ruby,” the name Rinaldi had imagined for a baby girl. Except, “there is no baby,” she writes at the end. “Instead there is the book you hold in your hands.”
And that is a frustrating book, with awkward prose, a perplexing protagonist and too many eye-rolling moments. Yet it is also a book I see launching book-club conversations and plenty of pillow talk — not just about sex and marriage, but about the price and possibility of self-reinvention. You don’t have to write a great work to cause a great stir.
Does Rinaldi reinvent herself? She survives the aftershocks and even seems to discover some happiness, however fragile she knows it to be. So maybe she needed this after all. Or maybe sometimes “empowerment” is just another word for self-absorption.
NY Post Article
Trapped in a marriage where the sex was routine, freelance journalist Robin Rinaldi, now 50, embarked on a 12-month experiment in which she lived apart from her husband during the week and took lovers. As she publishes her memoir, “The Wild Oats Project,” on Tuesday, she talks to The Post’s Jane Ridley about her erotic journey.
Pulling on his pants after our intimate encounter in my Las Vegas hotel room, the cute 23-year-old I’d just picked up holds out his cellphone, urging me to tap in my number.
“You really don’t have to take it,” I say.
Having sex with a stranger is thrilling, but I’m not that interested in a repeat performance.
Two minutes after he’s gone, I climb back into bed and text my husband, Scott, whom I’ve been with for 18 years. “Just saying good night,” I type. “Good night, dove,” writes back Scott from wherever he is.
Scenarios like these were typical during my year of living dangerously — the crazy 12 months in 2008 and 2009 I jokingly call my “Wild Oats Project,” when Scott and I had an open marriage.
Stuck in a rut — our once-a-week sex life was loving, but lacked spontaneity and passion — I was craving seduction and sexual abandon. I was having a midlife crisis and chasing this profound, deeply rooted experience of being female.
Before then, starting a family had felt like one route to this elusive state of feminine fulfillment. But Scott had made it absolutely clear he never wanted a baby, and even had a vasectomy.
Many people will find this hard to understand, but, as the door to motherhood closed, I found myself rushing towards this whole other outlet of heightened female experience — taking lovers.
I’d always been “the good girl,” and had slept with only three guys before getting involved with Scott at the age of 26. I was pretty conservative.
Sexually, I was experiencing what happens to a lot of women in their late 30s and early 40s. I was approaching my sexual peak and was relaxing into myself.
I broke the news to Scott that I wanted an open marriage in early 2008, a few months after his vasectomy. “I won’t go to my grave with no children and four lovers,” I told him repeatedly. “I refuse.”
Against the idea at first, he eventually relented. According to our deal, I’d rent a studio apartment during the week and come back to our home on weekends. Both of us could sleep with whomever we chose as long as we used protection. It was a case of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
My first step was placing an ad on nerve.com, a kind of intellectual version of Craigslist’s Casual Encounters. Under the heading: “Good girl seeks experience,” it read: “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.”
I added: “Our time together will be limited to three dates as I cannot become seriously involved.”
Within 24 hours, my inbox offered up 23 prospective suitors.
Rinaldi was 44 years old when she experimented with an open marriage. She placed the ad above on nerve.com looking for new lovers.
The first lover I met through nerve.com was a 40-something lawyer called Jonathan*. Slim, handsome with glasses and a stylish haircut, he suggested we kiss to test our sexual chemistry. “There’s a lot of heat there,” he said.
On our second date, the following week, he came to my studio after work with a cooler of snacks and some wine. We stumbled to the bed, where he turned me onto my hands and knees and took me from behind.
We had intercourse twice and, after he left, I felt satiated.
Modal Trigger
Robin Rinaldi was 44 years old when she experimented with an open marriage. After talking with her husband, she placed an ad online looking for new lovers.Photo: John Chapple
Around the same time, I took workshops at OneTaste, a sexual-education center, which has branches in New York and San Francisco, where I lived at the time. A sort of “sex-friendly” yoga retreat, it taught me something called orgasmic meditation, which is centered on the woman.
OneTaste was the place where I selected most of my lovers, although I picked up a couple of guys, like the 23-year-old in Vegas, on business trips. OneTaste was populated by cool, open-minded San Franciscans who wanted to expand their horizons.
They included an astrologer named Jude, 12 years my junior. The moment I saw him, I was irresistibly drawn in.
Slightly built and neo-hippy, he was spiritual, calm and centered. I was an Italian, meat-eating, busy magazine editor. But we had a real connection. I became infatuated with him, but the sex soon fizzled.
And then there was Alden, a writer, in his late 30s, who answered my nerve.com post.
“So your ad said only three dates,” he said, as we ate dinner in a crowded restaurant. “Yes,” I replied. Without missing a beat, he reached over and lightly took my fingertips in his. “Do you think we’ll be able to do that, to limit it?”
I loved our conversation, the fact he was a writer, the books he read. Things in the bedroom were mind-blowing and, before I knew it, I was hooked. But I’d made a pledge to my husband that I wouldn’t get involved with any of my lovers. I stuck to that.
And so the year went on. I had lots of “firsts,” including being intimate with women.
But the lessons I learned weren’t purely physical. They were about growing up, making mistakes, learning to live without so much fear, owning up to my dark side and, eventually, finding out the difference between being a “good girl” and a good person.
‘I OWNED UP TO MY DARK SIDE, FINDING OUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING A ‘GOOD GIRL’ AND A GOOD PERSON.’
On weekends, I’d go back to Scott. It wasn’t as strange as you might imagine. I liked it. It was the perfect balance, living on my own during the week and then returning home.
We knew we were both sleeping with other people, but we kept to the rules and never spoke about it. We had sex as always and the 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.
You’re changed.
I slept with a total of 12 people (including two women) during the Wild Oats Project.
Suddenly I found an updated version of myself. The person I was at 44 was so much different than the woman I’d been when I was last single at 26. She was less shy, more confident, wilder.
Meanwhile, it turned out that, for around six months, Scott had been exclusively sleeping with one woman, a lot younger than me. That bothered me, especially as they hadn’t been using condoms. But it wasn’t the catalyst for the end of the marriage, because he broke things off with her.
The turning point was hearing from Alden. He sent me an email, out of the blue, several months after the project had come to an end.
Before long, we were having sex again. Being with him was exquisite. After reconnecting with Alden and falling deeply in love with him, there was no going back.
Five years on, Alden and I are happily living together. It’s a regular, monogamous relationship. I’m grateful I experienced my marriage to Scott (who has since found a new partner) but now, for this part of my life, I believe being with someone who is the most temperamentally like me is where I can learn more.
As for not having children, I’m at peace with that, too.
First I channeled the creativity I would have used to become a mom into my sexuality, and then I channeled it into writing my memoir. As my story shows, there are many different ways in life to find passion and fulfillment.
NY Post Article
Trapped in a marriage where the sex was routine, freelance journalist Robin Rinaldi, now 50, embarked on a 12-month experiment in which she lived apart from her husband during the week and took lovers. As she publishes her memoir, “The Wild Oats Project,” on Tuesday, she talks to The Post’s Jane Ridley about her erotic journey.
Pulling on his pants after our intimate encounter in my Las Vegas hotel room, the cute 23-year-old I’d just picked up holds out his cellphone, urging me to tap in my number.
“You really don’t have to take it,” I say.
Having sex with a stranger is thrilling, but I’m not that interested in a repeat performance.
Two minutes after he’s gone, I climb back into bed and text my husband, Scott, whom I’ve been with for 18 years. “Just saying good night,” I type. “Good night, dove,” writes back Scott from wherever he is.
Scenarios like these were typical during my year of living dangerously — the crazy 12 months in 2008 and 2009 I jokingly call my “Wild Oats Project,” when Scott and I had an open marriage.
Stuck in a rut — our once-a-week sex life was loving, but lacked spontaneity and passion — I was craving seduction and sexual abandon. I was having a midlife crisis and chasing this profound, deeply rooted experience of being female.
Before then, starting a family had felt like one route to this elusive state of feminine fulfillment. But Scott had made it absolutely clear he never wanted a baby, and even had a vasectomy.
Many people will find this hard to understand, but, as the door to motherhood closed, I found myself rushing towards this whole other outlet of heightened female experience — taking lovers.
I’d always been “the good girl,” and had slept with only three guys before getting involved with Scott at the age of 26. I was pretty conservative.
Sexually, I was experiencing what happens to a lot of women in their late 30s and early 40s. I was approaching my sexual peak and was relaxing into myself.
I broke the news to Scott that I wanted an open marriage in early 2008, a few months after his vasectomy. “I won’t go to my grave with no children and four lovers,” I told him repeatedly. “I refuse.”
Against the idea at first, he eventually relented. According to our deal, I’d rent a studio apartment during the week and come back to our home on weekends. Both of us could sleep with whomever we chose as long as we used protection. It was a case of “don’t ask, don’t tell.”
My first step was placing an ad on nerve.com, a kind of intellectual version of Craigslist’s Casual Encounters. Under the heading: “Good girl seeks experience,” it read: “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.”
I added: “Our time together will be limited to three dates as I cannot become seriously involved.”
Within 24 hours, my inbox offered up 23 prospective suitors.
Rinaldi was 44 years old when she experimented with an open marriage. She placed the ad above on nerve.com looking for new lovers.
The first lover I met through nerve.com was a 40-something lawyer called Jonathan*. Slim, handsome with glasses and a stylish haircut, he suggested we kiss to test our sexual chemistry. “There’s a lot of heat there,” he said.
On our second date, the following week, he came to my studio after work with a cooler of snacks and some wine. We stumbled to the bed, where he turned me onto my hands and knees and took me from behind.
We had intercourse twice and, after he left, I felt satiated.
Modal Trigger
Robin Rinaldi was 44 years old when she experimented with an open marriage. After talking with her husband, she placed an ad online looking for new lovers.Photo: John Chapple
Around the same time, I took workshops at OneTaste, a sexual-education center, which has branches in New York and San Francisco, where I lived at the time. A sort of “sex-friendly” yoga retreat, it taught me something called orgasmic meditation, which is centered on the woman.
OneTaste was the place where I selected most of my lovers, although I picked up a couple of guys, like the 23-year-old in Vegas, on business trips. OneTaste was populated by cool, open-minded San Franciscans who wanted to expand their horizons.
They included an astrologer named Jude, 12 years my junior. The moment I saw him, I was irresistibly drawn in.
Slightly built and neo-hippy, he was spiritual, calm and centered. I was an Italian, meat-eating, busy magazine editor. But we had a real connection. I became infatuated with him, but the sex soon fizzled.
And then there was Alden, a writer, in his late 30s, who answered my nerve.com post.
“So your ad said only three dates,” he said, as we ate dinner in a crowded restaurant. “Yes,” I replied. Without missing a beat, he reached over and lightly took my fingertips in his. “Do you think we’ll be able to do that, to limit it?”
I loved our conversation, the fact he was a writer, the books he read. Things in the bedroom were mind-blowing and, before I knew it, I was hooked. But I’d made a pledge to my husband that I wouldn’t get involved with any of my lovers. I stuck to that.
And so the year went on. I had lots of “firsts,” including being intimate with women.
But the lessons I learned weren’t purely physical. They were about growing up, making mistakes, learning to live without so much fear, owning up to my dark side and, eventually, finding out the difference between being a “good girl” and a good person.
‘I OWNED UP TO MY DARK SIDE, FINDING OUT THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN BEING A ‘GOOD GIRL’ AND A GOOD PERSON.’
On weekends, I’d go back to Scott. It wasn’t as strange as you might imagine. I liked it. It was the perfect balance, living on my own during the week and then returning home.
We knew we were both sleeping with other people, but we kept to the rules and never spoke about it. We had sex as always and the 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.
You’re changed.
I slept with a total of 12 people (including two women) during the Wild Oats Project.
Suddenly I found an updated version of myself. The person I was at 44 was so much different than the woman I’d been when I was last single at 26. She was less shy, more confident, wilder.
Meanwhile, it turned out that, for around six months, Scott had been exclusively sleeping with one woman, a lot younger than me. That bothered me, especially as they hadn’t been using condoms. But it wasn’t the catalyst for the end of the marriage, because he broke things off with her.
The turning point was hearing from Alden. He sent me an email, out of the blue, several months after the project had come to an end.
Before long, we were having sex again. Being with him was exquisite. After reconnecting with Alden and falling deeply in love with him, there was no going back.
Five years on, Alden and I are happily living together. It’s a regular, monogamous relationship. I’m grateful I experienced my marriage to Scott (who has since found a new partner) but now, for this part of my life, I believe being with someone who is the most temperamentally like me is where I can learn more.
As for not having children, I’m at peace with that, too.
First I channeled the creativity I would have used to become a mom into my sexuality, and then I channeled it into writing my memoir. As my story shows, there are many different ways in life to find passion and fulfillment.
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