"This is the story about a girl who grew up believing what many girls believe -- that one day she would fall in love with the man of her dreams, marry him, have kids, and live happily ever after. Yet as she grew older, all she felt was confused ... "

This is how Jenny Block, author of the up-close-and-personal memoir "Open: Love, Sex and Life in an Open Marriage," launches into the inner-workings of her love life. In her book, she describes how she bought into the whole "monogamy thing." She married the nice guy, moved to a nice neighborhood, had a baby and then lost the magic. She eventually had an affair with her best friend, Grace. When she revealed the affair to her husband, a whole new chapter in their marriage opened up.

AOL Health had the opportunity to speak to Block about her feelings about monogamy, what it's like to share a lover with her husband, the ability to love and make love to two different people and what her 10-year-old daughter thinks of Block's long-term girlfriend Jemma.

AOL Health: Why do you think monogamy isn't for you?

Jenny Block: The simplest, light-hearted answer is what my father always says, which is that I'm a lot. I'm just a lot. I have a number of different jobs, I have lots of different hobbies, I always have a lot of different friends that are all very different. So in some ways it would be really, kind of crazy for me to just pick one person. I tried. I figured everybody else does it. How special am I? Am I such a rarity that I need more than one person? But [now] I don't think I'm a rarity. I think I'm just about as typical as it gets in the needing more than one person part. It's the honesty part that I think makes [my husband and me] unusual.

AOL Health: What do you think the rest of us are being dishonest about?

Block: If we think about the way our society works, it's very couples-oriented. It's very marriage-oriented. It feels like a falsehood that we're hanging onto, because in reality, people have other partners. In reality, [many] marriages end in divorce. It's a massive fairy tale that we're all clinging too.

AOL Health: So why didn't you just decide to stay single?

Block: I didn't know any of this stuff. I was as, (I hate to use this word) as brainwashed as everybody else. I was told that there was one way to do things: You meet this nice person that you want to spend the rest of your life with. I'm not so crazy as to think that I would somehow live a different way. That was just what you did, so that was what I did.

AOL Health: After a couple years of marriage, what about sex with your husband wasn't satisfying anymore?

Block: He and I have mismatched libidos. That's the only way I've come to describe it. I had a moment [where I thought], "I guess we don't belong together." I'd heard of people getting divorced because of sex and I thought, "What a bummer." We're great partners and great parents and we're great at it when we do it, we just want different quantities of [sex] or different varieties of it. Is that really a reason that people should throw the entire life away?

AOL Health: You had several monogamous relationships before your marriage turned into an eventual open relationship. Can you explain how you progressed toward this?

Block: It was so messy. I ended up having an affair with another woman three years into our marriage and she ended up telling her husband and he called me on the phone and said I had to tell my husband or he would. So I told [my husband]. He said, perfectly calmly, "How could you lie to me like that?" What he [was] really upset about was the lying. He didn't say one word about sex. I spent the next few years "behaving myself" because I didn't want him to leave me. I loved him. I wanted to stay together.

Then I finally approached the subject with him. I said, "I've done a bunch of reading and a bunch of research and we're really not that strange. People have open relationships. People opt to have other partners." My very sweet husband said, "Theoretically you could do that, but there are feelings and emotions and realities of life." We went back and forth for probably a year at that point. [We asked ourselves] "Does this really work? Are they these crazy people who are not like us, so it would never work?" We had this do-or-die moment. We invited my friend [Lizbeth] to join us [in a threesome] and it worked and she hung around for about six months and the three of us dated. We all kept looking at each other saying, "Is this weird? Should this be weird? Is it weird that it's not weird?" It's kind of like going to summer camp for me. I used to go to summer camp every year and and everybody got along. This is how life would be if ... people just lived the way they wanted and loved other people, and did what they felt was right and what worked for everybody and was fair and honest and open.

AOL Health: What do you get out of having an open marriage?

Block: More than anything, I get a sense of peace. I don't ever have a sense of, "What if there's something else out there?" It's exciting to be with someone new.

AOL Health: What do you think your husband gets out of it?

Block: He always tells me two things. One, for him it's about the freedom too. He hasn't had a girlfriend since that first one [we had together]. But he likes the idea of going to a basketball game or a bar and buying some girl a drink and hanging out and not feeling like I'm going to walk in and say, "What the hell is going on here?" It's fun to be attracted to other people. It's fun to feel sexy, after having me barking at him about chores. It's nice to have some pretty girls not yelling at him and see him as a person, not as a husband or a father, but as a person. That feels nice, that feels good. It's that and he feels like a success. When he and I were having troubles, he felt like he was a failure. He wondered what was wrong with him that our marriage wasn't deliriously happy? Now he feels like a success. Because I have everything and he has everything and everybody's happy. A happy, healthy marriage, family and household -- that can be a grand measure of success.

Next: Parenting, Safe Sex and Avoiding Jealousy in an Open Marriage