After being hitched to her spouse, Scott Mansfield, for 17 years, she made the critical decision to enter into a year-long open marriage so that she could experience life (and by life we mean sex) with other people.

Robin, 50, who lives in San Francisco, says that she and Scott, a brewer and wine-maker, were “stuck in a rut.” She told the New York Post, “Our once-a-week sex life was loving, but lacked spontaneity and passion.”

But, unimaginative sex isn’t what convinced Robin to try her experiment, and ultimately write a book about it. She says that she finally reached a breaking point in her early thirties when she realized that despite years of pleading, Scott would never be willing to have a child with her.

She wrote in The Wild Oats Project, “I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers… If I can’t have one, I must have the other.”

“I reached a point that a lot of us face in midlife where I was about to have an affair. I knew I was going to cheat, or we were going to get a divorce and something had to change. And I figured if I was going to do it, I was going to be fair and give him the freedom. I knew it was a long shot,” she explains.

And now for the terms: Robin rented an apartment where she lived from Monday through Friday. There she was allowed to court as many suitors as she liked. On the weekends, she returned to Scott and they lived like a happily married couple without asking each other what or who they did during the week.

“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,” she writes. “We had sex as always and the open marriage spiced things up — at least at first.”

The few conditions were that they had to practice safe sex, could’t sleep with mutual friends, and had to avoid “serious” relationships. Perfectly reasonable clauses, though they were all violated.

Robin, who had been off the market for awhile, began her exploits by posting an ad on nerve.com.

Within one day, she had 23 offers.

Her first paramour was a 40-year-old lawyer but she quickly moved on to younger men. She recalls texting her hubby goodnight from a Las Vegas hotel room immediately after a 23-year-old guy left her bed.

Over all, she had 12 encounters. Two were with women, one of them was a threesome.

After her trial year of condoned dalliances was up however, Robin and Scott struggled to make their marriage work.

“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.”

“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.”

Scott, had changed too. For nearly six months he had been exclusively seeing one woman, who happened to be younger than Robin but she says that didn’t bother her.

Read More: http://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/a63684/after-17-years-of-marriage-this-woman-took-a-year-off/