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. 
 
 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. 
 
 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. - Robin Rinaldi 
 
 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. 
 
 * All of Robin’s lovers’ names have been changed. 
 
 ||||| More 
 
 Robin Rinaldi did what many women dream of but few actually do: she took a year off from her marriage and made an agreement with her husband that they could both sleep with other people for a set period. 
 
 Rinaldi’s book, The Wild Oats Project, is a summary of what she learned during the year she spent in an open marriage. The idea came to her when her husband got a vasectomy after a long battle over whether they would have children — she wanted them, he didn’t. Faced with a future without a family, Rinaldi made a decision: “I refuse to go to my grave with no children and only four lovers,” she wrote, “If I can’t have one, I must have the other.” 
 
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 That’s when she embarked on the Wild Oats Project. Rinaldi and her husband had three rules: no serious relationships, no sex with mutual friends and no sex without condoms. Both broke multiple rules over the course of the year, and it eventually took a toll on their relationship, but Rinaldi says the project wasn’t as much a choice as “a calling.” 
 
 “It was unlike me to act that way,” she says. “I had always been a very cautious and somewhat anxious person, I had always played by the rules. It was something instinctual, and something very female driving me to do this. It wasn’t really planned and strategized as much as felt.” 
 
 Still, Rinaldi found that, while many of her friends were supportive, some people thought her project was threatening, even terrifying: “The tale of a woman giving up security, even in an above-board way and allowing her husband to do the same thing, giving up all that security in pursuit of passion and adventure, is a scary idea for a lot of people,” she says. “I certainly didn’t write it to intentionally push anyone’s buttons.” 
 
 And ultimately, for Rinaldi and her husband, this was their last chance at saving their marriage. “We knew how risky it was, and we might not make it through, but it was really the only choice we had,” she says. “So we both agreed, two consenting adults, to try this first.” Ultimately, she and her husband went their separate ways, but Rinaldi says the project taught her much more than a simple divorce would have. 
 
 The biggest thing Rinaldi says she learned from the Wild Oats Project is that she was putting too much pressure on her husband. “Expecting your spouse to provide passion and security and purpose, it’s a lot,” she says. “I was asking too much of that one person… So now, as a result, I don’t look to someone else to kind of unfairly provide all of those things. That’s the biggest thing I learned from it, and I couldn’t have learned it unless I actually went through it.” 
 
 She also learned a lot about sex, and about her own body. Rinaldi spent much of the project in new-age sexual workshops and orgasmic meditation classes, so she came away a greater awareness of her sexuality. “The sex was the classroom, but the sex was not the lesson,” she says. “Your body has wisdom, that is very powerful and can kind of show you your path, and you don’t always have to think it through or necessarily act based on other people’s rules.” 
 
 Still, Rinaldi wouldn’t necessarily recommend that other women take exactly the same path she did. Instead, she’d advise younger women to “sow your wild oats before you settle down — that’s a no-brainer.” 
 
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 “Good Girl Seeks Experience” read Robin Rinaldi’s online dating ad. 
 
 The 44-year-old journalist, who arranged an open marriage with her husband, was looking for men age 35 to 50 to help her explore her sexuality, she explained in the ad. She laid out the conditions: a public meeting, mutual respect, a three-date limit and no serious involvement. 
 
 So began the San Francisco magazine writer’s year of living lustfully. Week nights, she rendezvoused with lovers at her downtown apartment or at a coed commune dedicated to sexual expression. Weekends she spent cozily at home with her husband, a man she loved and had been with for 18 years. 
 
 Her book, The Wild Oats Project: One Woman’s Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost, is both a manifesto of freedom and a cautionary tale, she says. While the year played havoc with her marriage, she doesn’t regret it. “Sometimes things call to you that aren’t in the blueprint, that make your friends raise their eyebrows, but that in your soul, you know, ‘I gotta do this,’” says Rinaldi, now 50. 
 
 The stripper pole in the living room was an early clue that Rinaldi was itchy. In her early 40s, she felt a new sexual energy and was trying to spice up her marriage. 
 
 Life was shimmying along, until the positive pregnancy test. Rinaldi was elated. Her husband, Scott, devastated. 
 
 When the test turned out to be a false positive, a relieved Scott got a vasectomy. “There are moments in a relationship when something dies,” says Rinaldi. 
 
 If motherhood wasn’t in the cards, she somehow reasoned, she needed more lovers. “Both were symbols to me of a life deeply lived,” says Rinaldi, who regretted not sleeping around more in her 20s. At 26, she began her monogamous relationship with Scott. “I didn’t want to go to my grave with only four lovers.” Among her friends, four apparently ranked her as nearly nun-like. 
 
 So no more good girl. “I was sick of always doing the right thing. Something snapped,” says the sexual memoir author. “I broke bad.” 
 
 Scott agreed to the open marriage plan because he could tell she was “over the edge,” Rinaldi says. She and Scott, also free to roam during the week, decided on three rules: no unsafe sex, no sleeping with mutual acquaintances and no serious involvements. 
 
 Rinaldi’s romps started with a flirt she knew whom she calls Paul (the men have aliases in the book). “It was like training wheels. Someone I trusted.” 
 
 That’s followed by a very California cast of characters: Jonathan, a Silicon Valley lawyer; Jude, an astrologer; Andrew, a Ph.D. student in some new age spirituality. And the list goes on, including a Las Vegas hotel one-nighter with a no-name 23-year-old. The former good girl had mastered hook-up sex — the heated foreplay, twitching thighs, arching jolts, graphically described. 
 
 Only one guy, a writer named Alden, nearly stole her heart. “He felt like a kindred soul.” But they stopped seeing each other before it got too serious. After all, she was married. 
 
 In all her intimate encounters, she never felt scared. One muscular, leather-clad man worried her when she met him at a bar, so she walked out. 
 
 She met some of her lovers during workshops at the urban commune OneTaste, a sexual education centre. “It was a clean, safe place. It looked and felt like a yoga studio,” says Rinaldi, who moved into one of the commune’s residences for several months. At 6 a.m. residents would meet for 15 minutes of clitoral stimulation. “Then I’d get dressed and go to work. I felt very energized, like I’d had a brisk jog.” 
 
 By the end of her wild oats year, Rinaldi racked up 12 new lovers. She tried sex with a woman and in a threesome. But her biggest gains, she says, were not about sex. “I got back in touch with the adventurous, life-loving girl I once was.” 
 
 Resuming the marriage fulltime proved tricky. When she found out her husband had been seriously involved with one woman, Rinaldi flew into a rage. “It was the darkest moment of the entire project. I’m not proud of it.” 
 
 The marriage eventually sputtered out. Rinaldi now lives in Los Angeles with Alden, the “kindred soul” lover. “We’re both passionate people. I chose differently with this partner.” ||||| “Rinaldi yields insights through her willingness to reveal the messy way she muddles through the year... Unlike other recent memoirs in which a woman, finding her life wanting, learns what frightens her and emerges with a stronger sense of self, this one, to its credit, doesn't go for the Hallmark-card ending.” ―Elle 
 
 “Brutally honest and real . . . Refreshing” ―The Daily Beast 
 
 “A sexual-awakening romp wrapped in a female-empowerment narrative” ―The Washington Post 
 
 “If you want to read something about somebody who might be a lot like you, somebody who's brave enough to admit that she doesn't always (or even usually) know what she's doing but she does it anyway, somebody who won't preach at you or make you feel like you have it even less together than you do--then you can't NOT read this book.” ―Sara Nelson, Omnivoracious 
 
 “A stunning report . . . Readers will be provoked and fascinated by Rinaldi's forthright memoir of daredevil sexual exploration and self-liberation.” ―Booklist 
 
 “Rinaldi does not hide the dark side to this odyssey . . . her ability to grasp its soul-driving necessity without insisting on winning over her readers renders this a notable work of self-knowledge.” ―Publishers Weekly 
 
 “A sensitive, intimate and bold story.” ―Kirkus 
 
 “Robin Rinaldi's horizontal adventures will make you howl with laughter and cry with recognition--whatever the state of your romantic or sex life. And you'll stay up all night reading to learn how it all turns out. Her bravery and introspection are inspiring to anyone who has taken a moment to wonder: Is there more to life than this?” ―Amy Sohn, author of The Actress and Prospect Park West 
 
 “Her daring project and avid search for passion is a true page-turner. For anyone who's wondered 'what if' or 'should I?'” ―Library Journal 
 
 “The Wild Oats Project uniquely chronicles an intelligent woman's exhilarating pilgrimage into the rest of her life, living as she damn well pleases. And why not? Men have been doing so since the beginning of time. Rinaldi's memoir is groundbreaking, sexy, and a joy to read.” ―Suzanne Finnamore, author of Split: A Memoir of Divorce 
 
 “Robin Rinaldi's The Wild Oats Project is a daring and enlightening exploration of sexual identity, marriage, and the search for an authentic self. Rinaldi takes the reader on an enthralling journey, one that will not soon be forgotten. The Wild Oats Project is a rich and essential read.” ―Laura van den Berg, author of The Isle of Youth 
 
 “I loved this brave and inspiring book. Rinaldi rejects middle-aged quiescence in favor of living boldly, sensually, and to the hilt. Would that we all were so brave.” ―Julia Scheeres, New York Times bestselling author of Jesus Land 
 
 “Extraordinarily frank . . . Her book is important because of the way it unashamedly puts the quest for female sexual fulfillment centre stage . . . It is a testament to how far feminism has taken us all that a woman can not only undertake such an adventure but write about it so brazenly. And in a porn-saturated world where, too often, the lens through which we see sex is masculine, her unapologetic account of her search for sexual nirvana is hugely refreshing.” ―Sunday Times 
 
 “[Rinaldi] seduces us with her candor and vulnerability” ―Chicago Tribune
– A San Francisco writer's pledge to "take a year off" from marriage led her on a quest to sow a few wild oats with men she'd never met before, Time reports. In fact, Robin Rinaldi's book about her experience is called The Wild Oats Project. "Sometimes things call to you that aren’t in the blueprint, that make your friends raise their eyebrows, but that in your soul, you know, 'I gotta do this,'" she tells the Toronto Star. When her husband thwarted her desire for children by getting a vasectomy, Rinaldi made a deal with him: Each could sleep around for 12 months, providing it wasn't with friends, was with condoms, and never got serious. So at age 44, the woman who'd been monogamous for 18 years placed an ad for men who wanted to help explore her sexuality. She started with Paul, someone she already knew; then came a Silicon Valley lawyer, an astrologer, a PhD student in spirituality, a 23-year-old in a Vegas hotel—the list goes on. Some she met while living at a sex-ed, urban commune, where residents got together at 6am for a quarter hour of clitoral stimulation: "Then I’d get dressed and go to work," says Rinaldi. "I felt very energized, like I’d had a brisk jog." Ultimately, it didn't save her marriage, but she developed a finer awareness of her sexuality ("Your body has wisdom, that is very powerful") and learned more about being married ("Expecting your spouse to provide passion and security and purpose, it’s a lot"). She also has a tip about sleeping around: "Sow your wild oats before you settle down—that’s a no-brainer," she says. See an excerpt at the New York Post. (Or see which state plans to legalize "living in sin.")