"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.

AOL Health: How did your three-way relationship end?

Block: Lizbeth met a guy who wanted her to be monogamous and she decided to give it a whirl. The first stage of that ending was when she came to me and said she wanted to continue seeing my husband, but not me and would that be okay? I thought that could be really good because [he would be] in this really happy relationship with someone we both know and love and then I could start my exploration and feel like he's okay and it was a really natural transition. [But] when she met this guy, she and my husband stopped seeing each other.

AOL Health: How did you decide who to tell about your new open marriage?

Block: At the beginning, before the book, we just lived as we lived and we didn't lie about it. We always got the same reaction: "Leave it to Jenny to try something crazy." It didn't surprise people as much as I thought it would. When the book came out I'd get calls [from people] saying, "I saw you on 'Tyra Banks' today, what's going on?" I told everyone who needed to know [before the book came out] because I didn't want anyone -- my mom, my dad, my sister -- to be blindsided. For the most part, I think my daughter's friends and our neighbors don't know. If they do, they don't care, or they're too polite to say anything.

AOL Health: You have a daughter who is 10 years old. How much of the nuances of your marriage does she understand?

Block: I don't know. We answer all of her questions and we don't lie to her. My girlfriend is still my best friend, so it's not like she wouldn't be around. She has asked me some very pointed questions, which makes me think she's putting the pieces together. One day she asked me if three people can get married. She asked me if I love Jemma [my girlfriend] as much as I love Daddy. She said to me in the middle of dinner, "I'm really lucky because some people only have one parent and I have three." I said, "Why, do you consider all of us parents?" She said, "Sometimes Jemma makes me dinner and sometimes she picks me up from school. When Daddy cooks dinner, he says to set four places at the table. So we're a family." Kids see the truth and the happy family. That's what they see. If they see screaming and yelling and you keep saying, "No, Mommy loves Daddy," I don't think they buy it.

AOL Health: At some point are you going to tell her more about the details?

Block: Definitely. She keeps asking me when she's going to be old enough to read the book. I don't even know yet. I'm going to ask some writer friends who also have memoir pieces [what they've done]. When she asks about it and starts showing more curiosity about it and I think she's at an age when she can piece it all together, I think yes. I think it'd be kind of crazy to try to hide it.

AOL Health: Do you think she'll feel like you were lying to her?

Block: I don't think so. We told her that the book is about marriage, and about how grownups choose to love each other and some people don't agree with what Mommy says in the book. We say, "It's about grownup things and that when you're ready to talk about it, we'll talk about it." She gets the kid thing, grownup thing. She gets that stuff.

AOL Health: Have you raised her to be aware of alternative marriages and relationships?

Block: Yeah, definitely. I think that's the other thing. We have friends who are gay and lesbian. We talk about adopted families and extended families. We talk all the time about how people can choose to love who they want. Now the law doesn't always recognize those choices and she knows that too. She'll ask us questions, like we have friends who are a lesbian couple who were over one day and they were talking about other parents at the school and Emily asked, "Why do they not want [their children] to play with your daughter?" And I said, "Some people have a problem with two women being married." Her child response was, "That's just stupid." I said "Right, exactly." It's really that simple. We as a family think that it's stupid when people pass judgment on other people for choices that won't [hurt] them. It's plain old biology, you can't be mad at someone who has skin that's a different color, so why the heck would you be mad at someone who falls in love with someone of the same sex? We make it very like, "It is what it is."

AOL Health: Do you feel like you have been away from your husband or your daughter too much because of dating other people?

Block: No. Because, to be honest, before my girlfriend, it was all on trips I would have been on anyway. Since my girlfriend, we're all together. We're either all having dinner, or all hanging out. If I have to go to a review, I review a lot of art shows and concerts and things like that, someone would be going with me and most of the time it's her because my husband doesn't care for being dumped in a room to socialize with strangers. If anything, my work takes me away. I do travel writing. That takes me away, and sometimes I know all three of them would like to strangle me for that.

AOL Health: In the beginning, did you and your husband experience any trust issues as a result of your other relationships?

Block: No. One time we had a little slump when Lizbeth [the girlfriend my husband and I shared] and I were having a friendly argument, a regular old "someone had borrowed someone's sweater" kind of disagreement. She and my husband were leaving early for a beach trip where I was going to meet them a day later and I said to him, "Can you just not sleep with her tonight, so when I'm home alone and I'm mad at her, I can know that you're not together and we'll deal with it when I get there and then the two of you can get back to life?" He was like, "Yeah, whatever," and of course he ended up sleeping with her. I was like, "We can't do this. We have to be all on the same page." If he wanted to say to me he was going to sleep with her, that would've been fine, but you can't do whatever you want. It was like, okay, this is all new and we're making up the rules as we're going along, so let's just do better next time.

The proof is in the pudding. I'm not leaving. I'm there. We're both being loving, supportive spouses. I think one or the other would see something change and that would make us go "uh oh." That whole jealousy thing is wrapped up in the ownership thing. [My husband] doesn't own me. He loves me.

AOL Health: Have any of your partners ever gotten jealous?

Block: No. I had a couple of other partners who were just friends who I would just see a couple of times a year, so there wasn't a reason for that. And my girlfriend now is over all the time and she knows my husband. Everybody knows the deal. There aren't any secret meetings. He knows where I am. It would be different if nobody knew where I was, but they do!

AOL Health: Did you worry about STDs or pregnancies from outside the marriage?

Block: Yes and no. Yes, until I was very careful. And no, because I was very careful. I call it the steak-knife vs. butter-knife marriage. More often than not people cut themselves with butter knives, than steak knives because they're not being careful. People walk around married to people who assume they are not sleeping with other people and then they end up with some awful disease because they have no idea they needed to be careful with their spouse. We were very hyper-vigilant. Any time you have more than one partner, you'd be stupid not to think about that.

AOL Health: What do you say if someone thinks that an "open" relationship sounds like cheating?

Block: Look at what the word cheating means. In my understanding, cheating has to do with the lying, not with the sex. In some ways, I think a lot of people who are cheating on their spouses would say they aren't but they're exchanging flirty e-mails all day. In some ways, if your heart is cheating, that's worse than if your body is. Cheating depends on what the two of you as a couple have decided on. The two of us as a couple decided that this is okay.

AOL Health: Your past relationships were mostly of a sexual nature, but now you've fallen in love with your girlfriend Jemma, who has asked you to stay exclusive with only her, and your husband, who you're also still in love with. How does that work?

Block: You know, in some ways I have no idea. It feels very magical, like how did we luck out? I can be incredibly unnecessarily emotionally needy and now there are two people who seem very happy to support me in the way that I need each of them to. For example, if I have a problem with work, my husband does the "What do we do next? What are the steps?" sort of thing. My girlfriend is there doing the, "Oh, that sucks, I'm so sorry. Let's go eat ice cream." He wants to watch documentaries with me. She wants to watch romantic comedies. It's just like your friends. You have a friend who likes to go drinking, one that likes to go shopping. You have a friend who you would call in a huge emergency and you probably have other friends that totally suck at that. It's the same exact thing.

AOL Health: Your girlfriend Jemma asked you to not see anyone besides her and your husband. Do you call that an open relationship?

Block: Friends that are in tribes or in really open situations always joke with me, "You're not in an open relationship, you're in a triad." I say, "Whatever you want to call it." I'm calling it an open marriage. I can tell you that compared to other marriages, people consider this open because there is someone else. It works for all of us right now. It could all blow up in my face. Of course, so could any other marriage.

AOL Health: Do you think you'll want to stay with Jemma and your husband for the rest of your life?

Block: That's where we are right now. Every once in a while I wake up really nervous thinking that one of them is going to say, "I don't want to do this anymore." Then I do the whole nervous, "Is everything okay? Are you okay?" And the two of them are like, "Oh my gosh, of course!" We joke about buying one house together, or building two houses next to each other. We joke, but we have no clue. People think that marriage is somehow a done deal. You sign the paperwork and all that, but do you really know? No, of course not. He could leave at any moment. She could change her mind at any minute. It isn't any different from a [monogamous relationship].

AOL Health: If you had to choose a sexual identity what would you describe yourself as?

Block: I guess I'm bisexual, because if I'm interested in both sexes. I think I'm just sexual. If you look at the Kinsey scale I think we fall all over it. That myth about everyone being on one end or the other is just junk. Research has been done that says people are not monogamous. Research has been done, you don't choose to be homosexual, it's biological. The research is out there. There are no mysteries. You can't say any of this is unnatural. What's unnatural is any man-made convention that sets up a bunch of rules that are based on a religion that not everyone is a member of. That's contrived.

AOL Health: Do you think you've avoided divorce -- or other major issues -- because of your relationship?

Block: You now, people ask that all the time. Would I have left him, if he hadn't agreed to this? I just don't know. Once in a while, I get these nasty e-mails, saying, that if I really loved him, I would just leave him because he has the right to find someone else. I go and share it with him and say "Maybe they're right. You should go and go find Holly Hobby and get married." And he sighs and says "Why do we have to do this?" That's what he thinks is just bonkers. Giving up our relationship because of judgment by the rest of the world because half of it isn't even what it seems anyway. I know that's a non-answer, but I don't know.

AOL Health: Conversely, have any major issues arisen because of your relationship?

Block: No. No. Someone wrote this really clever, funny review about how my book was too much of a fairy tale, because there was no way that it could happen as nicely as it did. She just kept waiting for deer to jump out of the woods, and bring us a winning lottery ticket and a squirrel to cook us breakfast. I laughed. I wrote the author a note and said, "I loved your piece. I think it's really interesting. I think it's hard for people to believe that other people are happy doing something that is not familiar." And of course we've had our bumps where I'm like, "This is too complicated." I've screwed up where I've invited my girlfriend to a concert where I've already promised my husband the ticket. You slip during any relationship, but never any traumatic, huge (knock on wood) explosions have occurred.

AOL Health: Who would benefit from an open marriage?

Block: Couples who feel like they can openly communicate with one another in a way that could be terrifying. People who are ready to say, "I love you and ..." "I love you but ... " means you're leaving. That's the scary sentence. "I love you and ..." is "I want to be happy and expand and love more." Maybe it's not about mismatched libidos. Maybe it's about people wanting additional partners. Maybe it's about diversity or just expanding one's experience. If you weren't handed the "Cinderella" video when you were five, how would you organize your life? Going through every day knowing that this [lifestyle] didn't fit me -- that exhausted me.

AOL Health: Your book is very personal and reveals intimate details about your past and current relationships. Why did you decide to write about this topic on such a personal level?

Block: I felt so alone when I started this exploration. I felt really like there was no model. There was no voice, no one who looked familiar to me. I just had to.