How an Open Marriage Saved Their 35-Year Relationship

🗣️  From crisis to radical reinvention: Wayne Scott, acclaimed Portland psychotherapist and author of "The Maps They Gave Us," shares the extraordinary journey of how his 35-year mixed-orientation marriage survived through open non-monogamy.

Wayne's powerful story has been featured in the New York Times' Modern Love column, adapted for podcast and tv, and established him as a leading voice in relationship counseling for non-traditional couples. His raw honesty about confronting jealousy, inadequacy, and societal expectations offers insights for anyone navigating the complexities of long-term relationships.

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

🗣️ "Success in marriage isn't predicated on longevity" - Why relationships evolve
🗣️  How confronting personal insecurities can transform partnerships
🗣️  Why conventional relationship models don't work for everyone
🗣️  The importance of intentional communication during relationship crises
🗣️  How to reimagine marriage as "an act of imagination"

CHAPTERS:
00:00 Introduction & Early Relationship
03:42 The Crisis Point in Their Marriage
08:03 Their Therapist's Radical Suggestion
11:02 Navigating Jealousy and Inadequacy
15:55 How Their Children Adapted
19:44 Supporting Other Non-Monogamous Couples
23:50 Defining Successful Marriage
25:23 The Meaning Behind "The Maps They Gave Us"

Whether you're in a traditional marriage, exploring alternative relationship structures, or simply interested in human connection, Wayne's story offers profound wisdom on creating partnerships that honor both commitment and personal growth.

📲 Connect with Our Hosts:
Stacey: https://www.instagram.com/staceymgrant/
Mark: https://www.instagram.com/mark_lubragge_onair/

⭐️ Watch/Subscribe to Gurus and Game Changers on Youtube: www.youtube.com/@UCsRyuQWlLAYzM4IyJlF2IWQ 
⭐️ Listen on any podcast audio platform

📲 Connect with Wayne Scott
Website: https://waynescottlcsw.com/
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Maps-They-Gave-Us-Reimagined/dp/1625571542

#OpenMarriage #RelationshipAdvice #ModernLove #QueerStories

Transcript

00:01 - Mark (Host)
Stacy. 

00:02 - Stacey (Host)
Mark. 

00:03 - Mark (Host)
What are you doing Saturday night? 

00:04 - Stacey (Host)
Oh God, I knew this is what you were going to do, come on. So we were just talking about open marriages on the podcast and Mark asked me if I would explore it, if my partner was into it, and I said yes. 

00:19 - Mark (Host)
She would explore non-monogamous relationships. 

00:22 - Stacey (Host)
Why are you saying it like a newscaster? 

00:24 - Mark (Host)
I don't know this, just in Stacy's looking for a date. 

00:27 - Stacey (Host)
I am not looking for a date. All that I was saying is when you love somebody and they bring something up to you which is obviously not your perspective, mark you'll at least explore the option before you say no, I could not explore the option. 

00:39 - Mark (Host)
You would immediately say no, here's my hypocrisy. You ready, oh God, I could explore the option. 

00:45 - Stacey (Host)
That's not okay. But I couldn't. You wouldn't give your wife a holdout. 

00:49 - Mark (Host)
I just couldn't bear if my wife went out on a date with somebody else. 

00:52 - Stacey (Host)
I think that's your insecurity talking. 

00:54 - Mark (Host)
I don't think it's insecurity. I think it's, I don't know what it is You're a traditional monogamous person. I'm traditional monogamous, but that's how I was raised, you're raised that way. That's what you believe in, and that's how many people are raised Right. 

01:07 - Stacey (Host)
And that's why this. 

01:08 - Mark (Host)
I think that's why this episode was so fascinating. 

01:10
Yeah, because it gave us such a look at what is really common for a lot of people a non-monogamous relationship. This gentleman is a came from a history writer. He's a very prolific writer and he writes so beautifully and he speaks so beautifully. I really enjoyed this conversation so much and he comes from a place of experiencing it personally and he talks about that journey with his wife and his boyfriend and her boyfriend and the kids react. It was wild. Yeah, like I said, there's no, there's so many nuances to non-monogamy I never thought of. 

01:44 - Stacey (Host)
Right, and he talks about the memoir that he wrote in the episode. I don't think we ever go into the details of that, but it talks about how he shows up at the hospital. His wife is there with her boyfriend and her boyfriend's wife yeah, and he's with his 12-year-old son Right right. And his wife's boyfriend had just gotten in a horrible motorcycle accident, so he was in ICU and he now has to deal with the fact that he's bringing a burrito or lunch to his wife. 

02:13
And his son is with him in the car In that moment, and his son is open to this. So this memoir, which you can read in the New York Times still to this day, went viral. 

02:22 - Mark (Host)
Went viral. 

02:23 - Stacey (Host)
And it turned into a podcast, which turned into a television show called Modern Love and it was broadcast in Amsterdam and it's just, but this man is just so fascinating, it's just a crazy journey, it's a great episode, you guys. 

02:38 - Mark (Host)
He denied his true sexuality for 15 years and got married. 

02:43 - Stacey (Host)
It sounded like. Well, he didn't deny it he's bisexual. 

02:46 - Mark (Host)
That was my word. I'm sorry. 

02:47 - Stacey (Host)
Yes, yeah. 

02:48 - Mark (Host)
But he suppressed it. 

02:49 - Stacey (Host)
His wife knew he was bisexual. Right right, right, right. 

02:51 - Mark (Host)
But for 15 years. 

02:52 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
But, he was monogamous to his wife. Right, and then something changed which you have to hear about. 

02:58 - Stacey (Host)
It's wild, it's just really episode. What a story. You're going to love it. Enjoy, wayne Scott. Hi, I'm Stacey. 

03:07 - Mark (Host)
And I am Mark, and this is the Gurus and Game Changers podcast. Hey everybody, welcome to the show. I want you to picture the show Will and Grace right, Except in this case. Will and Grace are married and they have kids. Now layer in the complex relationships of the show Modern Family and what you're getting is just the beginning of the path that today's guest, Wayne Scott, has had to travel with his wife. It's very nontraditional. His story was the inspiration for the popular TV series Modern Love. 

03:39
He wants all of us to reimagine what a marriage and what a relationship can be. Wayne, welcome to the show buddy, yeah, thank you. 

03:50 - Stacey (Host)
Thank you for inviting me. I appreciate it. Good to have you here. I've been excited about this discussion. So, as Mark was talking about you describe your marriage as Will and Grace, with kids, cats and a mortgage. 

03:57 - Mark (Host)
Why do? You describe it that way Big mortgage. 

03:59 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Big mortgage. 

04:00 - Mark (Host)
It's always the mortgage that's the problem. 

04:02 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
The concept of Will and Grace is that they can't have other intimate relationships outside of each other because their bond is so tight and close. Now, one of the differences is Will in the show, will and Grace, is gay. He has no interest in women at all. Right, ours is slightly different in that when my spouse and I initially partnered, she knew that I was bisexual. 

04:24 - Stacey (Host)
When you first met your wife and you were in, I guess, the courting phase did you have these discussions about how your relationship would be different than a traditional relationship, and how did the conversation happen? 

04:36 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
We got together in the mid to late 80s, the word queer did not mean what it means now. It actually did not exist as this kind of all encompassing term for the LGBTQ community. It really didn't exist. There was gay and there was lesbian and then bisexual. Was this very suspect transitional identity and also very stigmatized? Because during the AIDS pandemic it was seen we were seen as the people who were going to bring the virus to the straight world. I tended to refer to myself as as gay um just because you know. 

05:09
But I was. I was interested in girls. I was definitely interested in my wife. When I first asked her out on a date, she went to her friends and says you know why? Why is this gay guy asking me out on a date? What, the, what the hell is going on here. Um, some of her friends had a clue and said no, he has dated women as well. 

05:28 - Mark (Host)
So real quick you started with. When my wife married me, she knew I was bisexual. Yeah, whether you're not, whether you're heterosexual, bisexual, it doesn't matter. At that point, right, you're committing to one person. Why would it matter that you were bisexual, like you're putting that, in the past? 

05:45 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Well, I mean, that's the question, right what are you going to do with that part of yourself? You know, when I talk about kind of the maps they gave us when we decided to get formally married, when we that was five years into our relationship we decided we were going to formally marry. That would make it easier for some of her family and relatives to understand. We were planning to move away 700 miles and for her father especially very traditional guy for his daughter to go with this quirky artist, social worky type guy, for him to feel comfortable with that. She had to be married. She had to be married. So we decided to get married. In that era it wasn't up for discussion whether or not you were going to be monogamous or non-monogamous. You were going to be monogamous. 

06:27 - Mark (Host)
You were going to take it. 

06:28 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
In fact we were told very directly by the minister who married us yeah, you have to have monogamy in the vows, you can't do it otherwise, which really kind of shortchanged a lot of things. We probably should have had a conversation about it, had a conversation about it, you know, what do you know in your late 20s? And also we were very devoted to each other. We thought I thought especially well, of course I can do this for her. I adore her. 

06:48 - Mark (Host)
So you were just denying half of yourself for the sake of keeping your marriage down. 

06:53 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
I didn't think I was denying it as much as sublimating it. You know, maybe that's the word I would have used. So I had lots of sort of cultural ways of keeping my queer identity alive, but no physical contact with other queer guys. 

07:10 - Stacey (Host)
Wow. So when did that change? When you went through sort of a critical point in your marriage and you looked at her and said this is not going to work, or did she look at you and say this isn't going to work? What happened? 

07:22 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Well, I wish there'd been a conversation. There actually was a crisis. There was a crisis. Some marriages they have a conversation and some marriages they have a crisis. We had a crisis. 

07:33
I knew that I was kind of lonely and I was missing that part of myself and that it was too difficult to pretend it didn't exist at about 14, 15 years in. But I did not know how to have the conversation with my wife. I didn't know how to have the conversation without it sounding like a conversation where I was asking for divorce and I didn't want to get divorced. I just wanted to figure out a way I could be my whole person in the marriage with the woman that I loved, and so I ignored the conversation. I didn't have it. You know I do. What a lot of desperate, lonely people do is I try to find connections on the internet, which is not something I'm prescribing to anyone, it's not a behavior that I'm proud of. And she found out and that's what precipitated our crisis, and that's when I moved out of the house and we thought we were going down the prescribed path, which is, yeah, if you have an infidelity, you get divorced. 

08:28 - Stacey (Host)
Then what happened after that? How did you come back together? Because that's I don't think a lot of marriages could survive that. 

08:35 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Yeah, yeah. Well, we started to see a professional. We found a really brilliant professional. She had a reputation in town for just being kind of magic. She was both a divorce mediator. She was also a couples counselor. 

08:54
After about nine months of going back to see Linnaeus, sort of nominally thinking we were getting divorced but doing an awful lot of work healing our marriage, she turned to us and said I wonder if the two of you have ever thought about having a non-monogamous arrangement. And it was as if the earth, it was like the big. It was as if the Cascadia earthquake occurred at that moment. It really was. It was like we were. We were just shaken to the bottoms of our souls because I didn't think a therapist, a professional, was allowed to say those words. We were shocked that she would mention such a thing. But she said what Lynnae said to us at that time is you get to decide the kind of relationship you want to have. I've worked with other untraditional couples who've made it work. It just takes communication, it takes intentionality, but if you decide that you want this to work, you can make it work. 

09:46 - Stacey (Host)
I feel like you two must be so in love, right? Do you know what I mean? Like in order to give each other, that thing to keep your relationship together. Yeah, I feel like there must be such a strong love there. 

10:02 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
It's interesting because, as we had different experiences on the route to non-monogamy, we had all these weird experiences where we were experimenting with different ways to have to do it, and each time I would write a short essay, partly to make myself try to come to terms with what we had just done, or something like that. 

10:18
And after a while I saw that I would write a short essay, partly to make myself try to come to terms with what we had just done, or something like that. And after a while I saw that I had about a half dozen essays about a couple trying to figure out how to do a non-monogamous arrangement, and when I put them chronologically in order I was like, oh, this could be a memoir. And one of the surprising things I saw when I looked at all the separate chapters was the through line was a kind of devotion, a kind of devotion you wouldn't actually think was there. But there was no way we could have done the different weird, challenging, risky things that we did with each other right unless we were pretty committed to each other and to making it work. Weirdly, I have kind of written a love story here without realizing it. This is a love story where, for most of the memoir, the couple think they're going to get a divorce. 

11:02 - Mark (Host)
That's amazing. What a twist. Yeah, I know, right, take us back to that first time that you are not monogamous, and what did that feel like? I mean, that night, as you're going into that meeting or that date or whatever, and you're, you're leaving the house and your wife knows where you're going and you know where you're going. What's going through both your minds and what are you both experiencing? 

11:24 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Uh, I think it is well. First of all, I want to say I'm going to say answer your question one in one second, but the first thing I want to say is a caveat is, I don't prescribe this for anyone. 

11:33
I really don't, I don't I don't prescribe marriage for anyone no-transcript date was brutally uncomfortable for both of us. Brutally uncomfortable, like you know, like it just really feels like your very selves are rebelling against the choice that you're making, because we've just been so deeply socialized to being monogamous and to thinking that anything else is wrong, right? So it's a very weird situation to be in because, logically and intentionally, we had agreed that it was OK. Okay, but emotionally it was really hard not to feel insecure and jealous. But I'll tell you, the interesting thing is and we had help with this, we had a lot of support to go down this path when she went out on her first, the first few times she was going out with the first boyfriend that she found, it was super hard for me to be the one left at home with the kids and just waiting, waiting for when she comes home, and I would try to look like I wasn't waiting. But I was waiting and I would feel this intense, deep insecurity and also a deep sense of inadequacy. I think in a traditional, conventional arrangement, when that kind of jealousy comes up, you kind of put it on the other person to do something different so you don't feel that way. But but because of the path we had gone down, I had to basically go more internal with that and confront it within myself. I had to really think about why. Why do these feelings of inadequacy come up for me? 

13:32
And for me it was a really, you know, it was an important time that I could reckon with having grown up as a queer kid in a heteronormative world where I was constantly getting a message growing up that there was something wrong with me, that I, you know I was. I was the kid who, like you know, cried inconsolably when I was signed up for little league Right. You know, I was a kid who, like I, wanted to play, I preferred to play with girls as opposed to playing with boys. You know I was a kid who, like I, wanted to play, I preferred to play with girls as opposed to playing with boys. You know I was deathly afraid of team sports. And so, you know, I got a lot of messages from my, my parents, from school personnel, from other kids that there was something wrong with me. And all of that came back full force in that moment of feeling inadequate when she was out with a better man. 

14:20 - Stacey (Host)
What did you do? How did you get through that? 

14:22 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
I just reckoned. I mean, I reckoned with it. I used it as an opportunity to do some kind of self-analysis. I had a moment when I'm miserable, I can't sleep. I decided I'm going to. You know what a lot of parents do we crawl into bed with one of our kids. You know, crawl into bed with my son. I think he was about eight or nine years old. And I'm thinking about all the ways in which I feel inadequate, right. All the ways in which I feel like I'm not a good man because she's found a better man, right. And I'm looking at my son's sleeping face and I had this overwhelming feeling that he's perfect, that it doesn't matter how it's, how how masculine or feminine or gay or straight or any of that stuff seemed completely be outside the coast. I looked at him. 

15:08
I thought he is just perfect, and if he's perfect as this little boy, I must have been perfect too um, and so it sort of it sort of helped me to sort of like kind of let go of all that cultural baggage that we take in as truth, but it really is just somebody else's ideas of who we're supposed to be. 

15:27 - Stacey (Host)
This episode is brought to you by Mainline Studios and the Podcast Factory, where great content feels right at home. Located in beautiful Wayne, pennsylvania, our creative rental space offers high-end tech in a space that feels like your best friend's living room. 

15:42 - Mark (Host)
book your session or a free tour at mainlinevideostudiocom, and back to the show that moment that she got home or that moment that you got home, did you have a deal like don't ask me about my night? Yeah, I think. I think I don't know how else you would do it. 

15:58 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, all, all couples I know and I have friends who are have these kinds of arrangements and then I also, as a therapist, work with couples who are working on these kinds of arrangements and there's definitely this phenomena called reentry dynamics, which is when you come back from a date or for something like that and couples have to kind of negotiate what's the way we neutralize the tension of that moment. Sometimes people want to talk about it directly, right, and sometimes people want to pretend it didn't happen. Sometimes people want to be in a different room or be out doing something, so they don't have to you know, deal with it or that kind of thing. 

16:36
So we, over time, developed our own strategies for how we did it. It helped for both of us. It helped if one of us was going to go out. It helped if the other went out. Um, just because if you're, if you're the spouse who's left to do kid work on a saturday night, you're like, oh, boy did I get there, joy did I get the short end of the stick. 

16:53
Oh my gosh. So it's better to get a babysitter both go out and do something. And then you felt like there were at least sort of we're a little bit more equal. It's a little bit petty, but it is how people are that totally makes sense, but I still want to know. 

17:05 - Stacey (Host)
I still want to know how you felt when you went out on your first date oh, um, I mean, I was, I was, I was excited, I was interested I was a man or a woman that you went out with her. I was a man, it was a man. 

17:18 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Yeah, and actually it's in a memoir. I, when I started venturing into the dating world as a married man, I found another bisexual married man who was also committed to staying in his heterosexual relationship, and so that's that too, and that was a very safe pairing because he and I were both clear there was going to be no kind of falling in love with and running off with each other. We were both, we both had kids, we both had wives. We loved that was, we were going to stay with those arrangements, but we wanted to have a friendship we wanted to have a special friendship. 

17:52
Um, and so we, so we. That just happened to be, that was the luck of the draw. I just happened to find the right guy. And so that just happened to be. That was the luck of the draw. I just happened to find the right guy. In 2020, I published an essay in the Modern Love column in the New York Times about. It was called Two Open Marriages in One Small Room and it was about being an open marriage and it got a lot of traction and they made it into a podcast and so, before I knew it in 2020, I was like I was very much on the map as a psychotherapist who had a personal story of being non-monogamous and so, yeah, I see a lot of couples who are non-monogamous, and so to me sometimes it looks like all of Portland, the city where I live, is non-monogamous. I know that's not true, but you know, going through my day, you think, yeah, they're all non-monogamous. There's not a single person here having a traditional relationship. 

18:42 - Stacey (Host)
I do have a question. So that essay was phenomenal. I read it and it got. There's a reason why it got so much attention and that was in 2020. And you had spoken in that essay about how you lived a traditional life with your wife. So no one from the outside knew that you were non-monogamous. You know, even after the essay, I guess, maybe, maybe people had more of a clue. 

19:06
But, but how would you sort of balance that right so, and and how did your kids come into play and when did you let them know? 

19:14 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
My son Miles who was who, who was with me on that in that essay and went to the hospital to see my wife's boyfriend after a motorcycle accident. He was, of all our three kids, the most comfortable with our arrangement because he had been so young when we decided to transition, that he really just never knew that there was anything, that there was anything different, like he, just it was so. So he's actually as in part of the premise of that. That short piece is that he's actually more comfortable seeing the boyfriend than I am. 

19:47 - Mark (Host)
Right. 

19:47 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Like I'm really uncomfortable. But he's like what is the big deal, dad? It's just Eric, you know, we know who Eric is and um, but it wasn't, it was a big deal for me. 

19:56 - Mark (Host)
Yeah, if, if, um, if your husband was open to a non-monogamous relationship you're asking me personally. 

20:03 - Stacey (Host)
Yeah, you personally. Could you? I would explore it all, right I got plans, sorry, tonight I I wouldn't, I wouldn't totally shut the door on it, you know, but as I was, saying, though, before, like it takes a lot of love and trust it does Right, wayne. 

20:20 - Mark (Host)
I mean it's like it's like a unicorn relationship. It can't, you can't, I don't think. So here's my question. 

20:27 - Stacey (Host)
Well, but you're so traditional you would. You are, I'm pretty traditional, but hold on. 

20:32 - Mark (Host)
So I don't think somebody like Stacy and her husband or me and my wife could suddenly say you know what? Let's explore that. Am I wrong and if so, what about the guy who's at home like hey, how can I get my wife to agree to a non-monogamous? What if one's thinking it? How do you even approach that? 

20:53 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
In some of the clinical stuff that I've written about working with um spouses where there's an interest in non-monogamy there's. We've coined this idea of ambivalent consent, and that's when someone agrees to experiment with a non-monogamous arrangement. But they're not all in, they're not really sure it's the right thing for them to do, but it's been framed in terms of it. It's the only choice that they're being given. Basically, you know like they basically the what the other spouse is basically saying yeah, if we don't do this, I'm gonna I'm gonna break up. 

21:25
When I first started working with non-monogamous couples, I really thought that one of the biggest drivers would be an interest in novelty sexual novelty and that has not been the case at all. There's so many different reasons that for a particular couple, it might make sense for them to go down this path. I think it's fascinating. 

21:49 - Stacey (Host)
I really do, and whatever you want to do is cool with me. I think it's awesome. But I think what I was trying to get at with the question about your kids too is are they open about it? Do they tell their friends Like do they get hurt? Would they be harassed for it? If their friends find out, like, how do the kids sort of fold into the relationship? Are you telling them kind of like let's just sort of, you know, let's keep this kind of? 

22:16 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
over here, Right right. No, we never told them that it was a secret. 

22:20 - Stacey (Host)
Okay. 

22:21 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
We always told them to use their own judgment about it. We were quote unquote out to them from a pretty early age I was. They always knew that their father was identified as bisexual. I have a question. 

22:35 - Mark (Host)
I think I have the answer, but I want to hear your answer, oh cool. Give me the think I have the answer, but I want to hear oh cool, I want to hear your answer. Thanks, um, based on you, the person, and you, the professional right. Both, both aspects of your experience define what is marriage. 

22:53 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Hmm wow, that's a big I should. I should have gotten that with homework to do beforehand. You know, I think. I think that here's I'll say what marriage is not Okay. 

23:07
I don't think that the success of a marriage should be predicated on its longevity. I don't, because we are allowed to change and adapt and grow and heal throughout our lives, and it's okay to be a different person when you're in your 40s than you were in your 20s. Thank God, it's okay to be a different person, right? It's okay to change, and I think that the ideal container for two people who want to live a life in tandem is that it is collaboratively and openly negotiated what it's going to look like and that, in fact, you know. I think that every marriage is multiple marriages strung together over time. Think about the marriage you had when you were in your 20s versus in your 40s. I mean, marriage is your 60s and your 70s and 80s is a very, very different thing. If you are blessed to have that kind of an enduring relationship at that point, then you're the holders of each other's memories. 

24:09 - Stacey (Host)
Is that what you thought he? 

24:09 - Mark (Host)
would say. I thought the answer I don't know you tell me. My short answer to that, in your words, was marriage is whatever two people who love each other decide, it will be yeah, I think I would say that that's kind of what he said. Only yeah, he's definitely a writer, because the way that you speak is so damn eloquent. Saying that mine was too simplistic, no, no, I'm just saying you said right to the point. 

24:33 - Stacey (Host)
Come on people um, so the title of your book speaking of eloquence, the title of your book the maps they gavequence, the title of your book the Maps they Gave Us, I believe, suggests sort of a traditional blueprint of how a relationship should be, so kind of you know going off of what your question was Mark, what did you like, are you happy? And what did you experience when you went off book, when you went off the map? 

25:04 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
the map. Well, first of all, I'll say the title comes from a series of love poems that were written in the 70s by the lesbian poet Adrienne Rich about the beginning of her lifelong partnership with Michelle Cliff, her lover, and the actual passage is whatever we do together is pure invention. The maps they gave us were out of date by years, right, and so it was sort of like this, like trailblazing language, to talk about what it felt like to be a lesbian couple in a heteronormative world that says this is what relationships are supposed to look like. But of course that doesn't fit when you're two women. You have to. You have to walk your own path. 

25:42 - Stacey (Host)
But have there been times when it hasn't gone so well, when it Shit? 

25:48 - Mark (Host)
went down. 

25:48 - Stacey (Host)
I mean that's the question Right. 

25:51 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Well, actually I think I may have misrepresented it, it wasn't. I wouldn't say it was placid. Okay, okay, in retrospect, right In retrospect, right In retrospect, as I look back on, this has now been an iteration of our marriage that we've been in for about 15 years. We've been together for 35, right. So like, yes, I am comfortable in the marriage that I'm in. 

26:13
But the period that's depicted in the memoir is a crucible period and really for the most, for the vast majority of the memoir, the couple do think that they are divorcing. They really do think they're divorcing but their behaviors are saying otherwise. So their heads are saying that they're divorcing but they keep coming back together. They're kind of stuck with each other. And it wasn't, it wasn't placid at all. Partly what I part, part of what motivated me to want to write it, is I wanted to write a story of a very messy period, a couple's life, because sometimes it is very, very messy, sometimes it looks really bad and painful and in some ways I kind of wanted people to know you can actually have a crucible period in your marriage where it's unbearably hot and painful and you can come out on the other end. 

27:05 - Stacey (Host)
So I mean, it is sort of an option that could be considered, if people want to be with other people, but they still want to be in the relationship. Yeah, why not explore it? 

27:16 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We really expect a lot In more conventional arrangements. We really pile on a lot of what we're supposed to get from each other, right, you know you've got your economic partner, your business partner, your parenting partner, your sexual partner, your person you vacation with, and not all of those necessarily line up, you know, in a single person, right, and yet it causes a lot of unhappiness when that's what we want. You know, when we want that one person, who's going to be the everything? You know, especially as we get older, we get more defined in our preferences, tastes, the things we want to do and don't want to do. 

27:53 - Mark (Host)
There's so many nuances here. Mic drop I think that was a mic drop statement that he just made. 

27:59 - Stacey (Host)
I think that is something I never even thought of, and I work with my husband, so that's another oh my god co-workers. 

28:05 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Jesus, what am I trying to expect from this guy? Do you have a pet together? 

28:10 - Stacey (Host)
yes, three cats, one dog, oh man, it's ridiculous, you're in deep. Two kids yeah, anyway, yeah. 

28:16 - Mark (Host)
Yeah, anyway, it's way too high. 

28:18 - Stacey (Host)
OK, so your book is out. Now it's coming Right, so people can buy your book. What else? What's next for you, wayne? 

28:26 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
That's a good question. I'll tell you, I never thought I would be a book author. I always thought I was just going to write essays and journalism and things like that. And now that I have a book out, I'm like why would I ever write anything other than a book? Like this, was I mean, because this was really fun. This was really fun to write this. It was challenging and it was risky. I'm very proud of the story I told. 

28:49 - Mark (Host)
I can't thank you enough. This has been a great conversation. You've given us a look into a world that I don't think people understand it. We think it's a very simplistic thing, but there are as I was saying, but there are so many nuances and so many considerations for a couple that's either considering or exploring this world. 

29:05 - Stacey (Host)
I've loved meeting you, Wayne. 

29:07 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Yeah, Thank you so much. A lovely conversation and so early where I am, so you know it was good, you know you guys are good Like. 

29:13 - Stacey (Host)
I came just alive for you, right? Yeah, you came alive. 

29:16 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
And it's not literally just coming up. You came alive. The sun is literally just coming up here. 

29:21 - Stacey (Host)
Well, you brought the sun. You brought the sun to the interview, so thank you. 

29:25 - Wayne Scott (Guest)
Thank you so much. 

29:26 - Mark (Host)
Yeah, thank you. I'm so happy to learn everything that you've talked about. All right, my friends, be well. Thank you for watching. We'll see you later. 

29:43 - Stacey (Host)
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