February 14, 2023 • 36 mins
On the cusp of her seven year wedding anniversary, host Jo Piazza begins her investigation into female infidelity. For so long the trajectory for women has been that we would be good daughters, good wives, good mothers and good caretakers. But contemporary women have more choices and options and frankly they want more. In fact, the rate of infidelity among women has reportedly risen by about 40% since the early 1990s, while the rate of male infidelity has remained pretty much the same. So, what’s going on?
In this episode Jo meets "Nikki,” a mom of two in her thirties who had a marriage that looked great on paper, but was lacking the desire and passion she craved. When she looked for those two things outside of her marriage, she not only found the hottest sex she had ever had, but it also made her question why men have been allowed to call all the shots in relationships for so long. Jo also speaks with Susan Shapiro Barash, whose book this podcast is based on, and asks her what she’s learned from 30 years of research on female infidelity.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
I thought everything I wanted and needed the hottest sect
that I had ever had in my life, and I
thought it was interesting to recognize that, uh so, this
is how men do it. And then when I thought
about it, like why are men the only ones to
get to call the shops? That's Nikki. She's in her thirties,
(00:24):
she's a mom of two, and she's been married for
more than fifteen years. Nikki isn't her real name, and
you'll see why she wants to use a pseudonym. What
you're about to hear is Nikki telling the story about
cheating on her husband for the past twelve years. So
we agreed to meet up at a hotel I know
(00:45):
the hotel, and it was like instant Bark, instant Blaine,
the hottest sect that had ever had in my life,
hours and hours and hours of set. I'm Joe Piazza
when you're listening to she Wants More. I've spent the
(01:08):
past five years making a podcast about marriage called Committed,
and I loved talking to couples from all over the
world about their relationships. These couples told me everything about
their marriages, the good, the bad, the better and the worse.
But lately, I've been hearing another kind of story. More
(01:28):
and more of the women that I know have apparently
been having affairs, And at first I thought it was
maybe just my extended social circle, but I dug in
a little bit more and discovered that the rate of
infidelity among women has actually risen by about forty percent
since the early and the rate of male infidelity shockingly
(01:52):
has remained pretty much the same. So what is going on?
Are women really cheating more than they used to or
are they finally just talking about it more? And who
are these women and why are they doing it? That
is what I'm here to find out. I'm just worried
(02:18):
a little bit about quality. It sounds because I have
like the watchers going, I'm multi capting Magnelivania and like,
so I want to make sure the audio wasn't sad.
This is the beginning of my conversation with Nikki. I
told her that her audio was fine. We can hear
her perfectly well, and every woman listening to this we'll
(02:38):
understand that she's multitasking right now. Before we get back
to Nicki's affair, I wanted to go back to the beginning,
back to her marriage, back to the man that she's
been cheating on. So I met my husband when I
was funny. I was raised to marry a certain kind
(03:00):
of man and lives a certain kind of life. And
so we have been on paper and outside looking in
very happily married for fifteen years. But inside of our marriage,
although we do love each other, he is just kind
of a loop, not super dialed in, kind of would
(03:22):
rather just not bring things up than mouris rocking the
boat by talking about them out loud. I was really
struck by how similar Nikki sounds to a lot of
my friends. She's a mom like me. She has a
successful job, and she has this nice life that, like
she says, looks really great on paper, but underneath the surface,
(03:47):
something wasn't right, And I had to ask her what
changed in her marriage that made her choose to have
an affair in the first place. You know, when communication
starts to fail, sex isn't happening anymore. As you grow
from early twenties and well into your thirties and late
(04:09):
thirties and beyond, start to realize, well, this is actually
what I want, or I would have thought about that.
I didn't realize that this is what I needed in
a way, you recognize that you're different than you thought
you were, or maybe you've just grown and maybe your
partner or your spouse hasn't. And it's not really their
(04:31):
faults because you can't change who anyone is, and you
can't force someone to change. At the same time, you're
stuck with one of the biggest problems I think we
face as adults, and that's do I live a life
a stability, keeping family together, keeping routine the same, or
do I find a way to feel fulfilled, happy, sexually happy,
(04:58):
romantically happy, and all those things that we all know
life is too short to go without. Then Nicki finally
hit a breaking point when sex with her husband just
wasn't doing it for her anymore. So I began with
asking my husband for different things in bed. I wanted
him to thank me, pull my hair, do different things
(05:23):
like that, and he was, you know, agreeable, receptive. So
when it came down to the sheet, I'm not even joking,
he would just like give my butt like attack, and
so it makes you so embarrassed because you feel like
a well, I just made him feel uncomfortable or he's
not comfortable doing this, or maybe he thinks something's wrong
(05:46):
with me for wanting this. I mean, I feel like
hair pulling and but banking or fairly, I don't know.
Maybe it twisted vanilla, but they're not that wild. So
there was no way I was going to go deep
for you know than that once that failed attempt, but
I still talked about it. We have date nights over dinner,
and I talked about the things that I wanted, and
(06:08):
I think through all of our relationship together, you know,
I would always the initiator, always more sexually driven than him,
which I think is a different role to consider it
in a man anyway, However, that's a true story, you know.
And so once I became frustrated enough, I stopped initiating,
I stopped having the conversation. I was tired of hearing
(06:29):
myself talk and tired of getting nowhere and just going
through the same missionary motions. So Nicky did what anyone
thinking about having an affair would do in the digital age.
She googled it, and I popped a website called Ashley Madison.
It's a well known online dating and sex site for
(06:51):
married people who are looking to have affairs. I thought,
you know what, I'm just gonna get my talent and
create a profile. Who cares, No is gonna know it's me,
and let me just see what's out there. And so
I put a sexy photo of my mouth down to
(07:12):
my cleavage but not my face, and I filled out
as many things about myself that I was willing to
share that were true, and I just wrote an open
paragraph or two about what exactly I wanted. And it
was like a torrential downpour of potential men begging to
talk to me. Oh wait, I've got and I've got
to say, what did that feel like? Crazy? Because when
(07:37):
you're with the same person for fifteen plus years, first
of all, no one else has seen you naked, You've
never thought about being with someone else. You don't have
any self esteem of confidence when you start thinking, but
maybe not any, but very little, because it's like starting
from scratch again. Even though the steaks aren't super high
or not shopping for a boyfriend or a husband or
(07:58):
anything like that, but the idea of getting naked with
someone new was reasonally terrifying. So created this profile. I
watched hundreds of messages come in, and no one has
the time to read that many messages. So I would
quickly screen them either based on their photo or what
their profile had said, and the ones that I did
(08:20):
want to respond to. This is gonna sound so nerdy,
hopefully in a very hot way. I kept the spreadsheets
and all my spreadsheets or identifiers by their screaming and
things like consistency. If they said they were going to
talk about something, did they or did they message me
once and then fall off the face of the earth
(08:42):
to communication that they actually know how to talk to
a woman, because it's not enough to be hot or
look good naked, or even to have some kind of
amazing sexual skills. And so I screamed more than a
hundred men that made it to that point on the spreadsheets.
The spreadsheet was like the nerdy version of a Little
(09:05):
Black Book. I would say, this is definitely nerdy in
a hot way, by the way, total nerdy in a
hot way. Totally. Also, I imagine that a woman's spreadsheet
is much more rational and organized than a man's spreadsheet.
No offense, but I think most men at most would
have had a post it note or a scrap becauld
(09:26):
favor from a wallet. We'll be back after a short
break and we'll find out what happens when Nikki finally
starts meeting some of those guys on her spreadsheet, we're
back with she once more. At first, Niggi got a
(09:48):
lot of really porny messages, and she was shocked by these,
as she should have been. She'd been with the same
man for fifteen years. But anyone that's ever been on
any of these dating websites knows that if you put
yourself out there, you're going to get some pretty dirty messages.
And at first she wrote those things off. But then
(10:12):
Nicki got curious and she started exploring things on her own,
and that opened her up to a whole new world
of possible pleasure. Mm hmm. You would be surprised at
how early in the conversation some men will introduce these questions,
and so that puts you on this path of exploring
(10:32):
how do I make this happen to myself. You started
exploring different toys, like, for example, I was really afraid
of like platoral suction toys because I thought it would
hurt me. Now I barely go without it. So it
really did open up so much that you didn't even
know was out there exactly because I was so young
(10:52):
when I met my husband. And I was raised very traditionally,
very strict as the only child of my parents that
just do not want anything sexual or otherwise to come
into my brain. And so I lived a repressed life
until you know, late thirties, and so I had this
whole world out there I had no experience or knowledge of,
(11:13):
and I was just sick of it. And once Nikki
did finally feel sexually savvy and confident enough to meet
some of the more appealing men on her list, she
set it up so that no one would ever find
out what she was doing. She created a Google voice
number and a WhatsApp to make sure that none of
(11:33):
these conversations would ever be saved on her phone. And
then she just started talking to some of the men
that she was tracking on her spreadsheet. After that came
the next step, meeting them in real life. I down
colected to the top ten, and after video chatting to
(11:56):
verify identity, I met each of these ten men in person.
For some we went and had a cocktail, someone took
a walk in a park a couple of weeks for breakfast,
and I picked the best of her all based on
our chemistry, the quality of person I believed him to
be what he had to offer the affair, and he
(12:18):
was really respectful not only of me, but of my process.
And so we agreed to meet up at a hotel
and it was like instant spark, instant flame, the hottest
sect I had ever had in my life, hours and
hours and hours of sects, and such a masculine kind
(12:39):
is a progressive way that I had. My whole body
was craving for so long that I had nearly begged
my husband. My oblivious, barely paying attention, doesn't want to
talk about his husband. I begged him, and all of
a sudden it was writing from me. I couldn't believe it.
And I was so proud of myself in a way
(12:59):
that I did just follow all over this man and
just fall in love and have all the hard eyes
and I it's very mature about it, and I thought
it was interesting to recognize that, uh so, this is
how men do it. I didn't feel attached to him
at all. I got everything I wanted and needed, and
I gave him everything I wanted to as well, and
(13:19):
then that was it. And then when I thought about it,
like why are men the only ones that get to
call the shops. Why are they the ones who get
to have all their sexual pleasures to build? Even if
you watch porn, how many porn videos have you seen
that are all about the woman climax thing? Just like
(13:41):
the word a fair is typically associated with a man
having an affair and behind closed doors, it just makes
you want to laugh like it. Don't underestimate women because
we are capable of getting everything we want and doing
anything we can think of. NICKI knew that this was it,
this was what she'd been missing, and she ended up
(14:04):
meeting with the same man again and again. The first
time I met him was September twenty nineteen. I have
seen him so many times. We consider each other friends.
We talk openly with each other. He's been very supportive
and encouraging of me exploring and going on other dates,
(14:25):
and so I did. I've got a lot of dates,
and I've seen him specifically a lot of times, and really,
after a couple of years in this experience, I'm so
lucky that it was him the first time, because he
was so respectful of me, so kind, but also scorching
hot and my best xt ever. And is he married too?
(14:46):
He is? And how much do you talk about your spouses,
not a lot. We feel like we know. It's pretty
much everything that we needed to know. And unless one
of us is having an issue. I know his wife
has threatened to leave him few times, and so we
talked about that on his end, just as far as
giving support and talking things through. And funny enough, in
(15:08):
the beginning of this conversation we were talking about everyone
comes down to the line, what are you gonna do.
Are you gonna leave your kids so you can go
and get whoever and be free and clear about it,
or are you gonna keep your family together and find
a way to be happy? And this, for you is
the answer to keeping your family together, also being happy,
(15:31):
and also feeling fulfilled. Absolutely, And for Niki that means
keeping completely separate lives. She's essentially the home edit of
having an affair. She can put her family in one
bucket and her affair and another, and she organizes her
entire lifestyle so that the two things never cross streams.
(15:55):
We don't involve anything from our personal life with our
affair lives. We are not in position to run into
each other. We don't have mutual friends, we don't work
in the same industry, we're not going to casually see
each other on the sidewalk in an awkward way. We
quite literally have a completely separate life that no one
knows about. I don't know if you're a fan of
(16:15):
Nagan the Stallion, but in one of her songs, who says,
it's okay because I have another that'll do it if
you won't, And it brings me back to the conversation
with my husband of asking him to thank me and
pull my hair and talk to alreat eating me, and
all of these things. And this wasn't onto the next
(16:36):
because once you start growing your sexual exploration and adventuring
and experiencing getting what you want, it's uncharted territory. But
there's also really endless possibility. So until you've come to
a point of wanting to slow down or settle down
or so a different way, it's just like a tank
(17:00):
of gas that's fool and getting the keys to the
car handed to you every time you want to take
a ride. Do you think having the affairs makes you
a better wife and partner. I don't know about that,
but I will say that it makes me less resentful,
less spiteful. I don't have a lot of contention built
(17:20):
up in my chest, or stress or anxiety or any
kind of that negative cloud that kind of grows within
you when you go without for so long and you
start looking at this person like, why can't you understand?
Why can't you give me these things? And why are
we stuck in this marriage? When I deserve to be happy.
I deserved it, feel good and all of these things.
(17:41):
So having that room to breathe, it just makes you
less bitchy, for lack of a better words, There's less
resentment because I know that if I want to do
anything else, I'm going to do it. I'm more confident,
I am more self aware, I have better self esteem.
And it also bleeds over into a lot of other
(18:02):
areas such as a friendship, professionalism, my role at work.
Everything I do is different now because I'm different now.
How so how does it How does it plead over
into your professionalism and work? And how do you feel different?
When I walk into a room and I'm going to
give a meeting or maybe I'm speaking in public, I'm
(18:22):
not worried about what somebody thinks about what I'm wearing
or how I look, or if I am so stressed
out from being so sexually unfulfilled. That is showing on
my face, and I'm wondering if people are looking at
me asking themselves. I wonder how often she gets it.
You know, all the things that go through people's minds
that you really shouldn't concern yourself with, But when you're
(18:44):
so unhappy and so stressed over it, all of these
things just start to bring it down. But when you
become sexually fulfilled, you become more confident in your body
and how you feel naked, and how you make other
people feel and how they feel about you. Knowing that
you have the keys to the kingdom and you can
(19:04):
control it however you want. That's a big sense of power.
It could be a total ego trip if you let it.
So when I walk into a room, I'm not nervous anymore.
I know so much more about how men and women
think sexually than I ever could have imagined without this experience.
So I feel less stressed, less worried, I feel more powerful,
(19:28):
I feel more confident, I feel more in my real self,
and I'm just not afraid anymore. What do you feel
comfortable telling me about one of your wildest, greatest, most
fulfilling experiences. I think the wildest I was getting overwhelmed
with so many messages from so many men, and because
(19:51):
I always practice say sex and wasn't really in a
position to drive a group sex or gang bang scenario,
if you will. There was a day where I saw
four different men in the same day and I expect them,
all four of them, and it was amazing. Wow, I
(20:13):
was not expecting that answer. So four different men were
they were all of the experiences different totally in moment
one of them, I where it was like maybe twenty
minutes in and out and I was like, I see
you later, have great rest of your weeks. Like I
did not care. I didn't need to be held or
cuddled or kissed. I didn't need any of it. I
(20:34):
was able to then to shower, to take a meeting,
come back, have a dinner date, asked on again. It
was amazing. It was so cool because I got to
really be in the driver's seat, get exactly what I wanted,
and I just happened to feel sectually greedy that day.
And it's like, then such a power trip to be
(20:55):
able to command the sexual presence of people you desire
and have them to fill whatever it is you need crazy.
We'll be back with more from Nikki. After a short break,
(21:16):
we're back what she wants more. The trajectory for women
has been until the late twentieth century that we would
be good daughters, good wives, good mothers, good grandmothers if
we were lucky, and that was the arc. And what
contemporary women are saying is that with more choices, they
(21:41):
end up having the ability to finesse an affair and
the drive to finesse an affair if they so choose.
That's Susan Shapiro Bearish, her book, A Passion for More,
inspired this podcast, and she's been researching women and affairs
for more than thirty years. How do you think affairs
(22:03):
have changed since she started doing this in ninety years ago.
Are you seeing more affairs, less affairs, women being more
comfortable talking about them. What are the big changes that
you've seen. First of all, I do think there are
more and more affairs. I think that women have more agency.
I think that women are more self aware with every decade,
(22:25):
so they're really saying, well, what am I not getting
in this relationship? And how lucky I am to have
found this lover who can provide when I'm missing so
women are feeling more like they deserve to have an affair,
And of course I don't want anyone judged. You know,
this is just in the pie of life, and women
(22:47):
who have affairs, they're saying I want more. In fact,
I have a passion for more. Before talking to Susan
and Nikki, I'm not sure if I thought of an
affair as just another choice, But the more I think
about it, it just makes sense. As women throughout the
(23:08):
course of history, haven't we always gotten the short end
of the stick? Haven't we historically, and frankly even right now,
lacked the autonomy to make decisions about our own lives
and our own bodies. So is an affair just a choice?
A choice to feel happier, a choice to feel good,
(23:28):
the choice for more. But an affair doesn't happen in
a vacuum. It can always go further. And what happens
when that affair isn't just sex. It's a relationship that's complicated.
I decided to ask Nikki, you seem really good at
(23:51):
not getting emotionally attached, But has there been a time
when one of these relationships started to cross a line?
I think the way you know you cross the line.
It's like any other relationship. If you just start thinking
about that person constantly, you can't stand it. When you're
not talking or texting all you wanted to be with
that person, you've gone too far. And it definitely organically
(24:15):
happened with a man in New York, and honestly, I
don't know if it would have stopped or how it
would have stopped, but he got caught and it stopped abruptly,
and because I had feelings for him, it just was
so painful. And being in the long term relationship in
a marriage so young, that's something I hadn't really experienced before,
(24:38):
like grown up version of heartbreak. And it stopped, and
I so so shitty. And you know what else, It's
like the old saying, if you want to get over
one man, you have to get under another. And it
was so true. And I went right back to Ashley
Madison and got back on the horse. Nikki got right
back on the horse. She just wanted to have X,
(25:00):
but with the next guy she ended up getting way
more than she bargained for. And then last year, literally
was planning an appointment for a Wednesday afternoon, and this
was a Friday, and I said, I can't talk on
the weekend, but if you can video tell with me
on Monday, I can confirm my availability for Wednesday afternoon.
(25:24):
Quite business like, I got on what's up? I got
in this video call and the man staring back at me,
the connection of his eyes, the way he looked at me,
I was like, funk, I should have breast my hair.
Oh my gosh, guy. I don't know what it was
about him, because I wanted to be like such a
hard ass and I we're like, I haven't even breshed
(25:44):
my hair yet today. And I don't only care about
this video meeting because I'm just going through emotions with
you to see if I want to have sex. I
just stopped something different, and so we started talking NonStop
through that through video on the phone, which not stop talking.
And so we met that week. And I feel like
(26:06):
I have butterflies all over my body right now just
telling you this, because we've been involved since last August
September and we have had the most intense, dramatic romantic
relationship of my adult life, and I have no idea
what's going to happen. I feel like because I know
so much about so much of this whole world as
(26:28):
far as affairs and things, I have no idea where
it will go. I have let go of the expectation
of not being close to someone and not crossing lines
because rigid boundaries like that are really hard to follow.
And it sounds really good on paper, but being good
on paper isn't enough. That we know, and that's what
brought us here to this entire conversation. So now I
(26:51):
see him exclusively and we'll see what happened. Wow, And
so you're open to that if it came to you
were both in a place where you could leave your spouses,
you would with this person. Finally, be open to that,
I think so. And he's gonna he's already he's not
married anymore, and so it's I'm the one who is married.
(27:13):
And so now I'm spending a lot of time with
him and his because and we definitely talk about the future.
Not there yet, not been the easiest road for this relationship.
I just don't know where it will go. But I
feel like I have a lot of control and experience
under my belt to be in a good position to
(27:34):
make the right call when it comes time to it.
But you've met his kids, that's a big deal. I know,
of course, but he can't meet and he can't that
is that is a lot to be feeling right now.
You're going through a lot. It is a lot, and
it's I think one of the hardest things about it
is when it's really heavy and you know, I've got
(27:56):
that ball of anxiety and your stomach and that lump
in your throat and someone who everybody else in your
life doesn't know about it, so there's no one really
to talk to, and then people don't understand why you're
reacting a certain way because you don't really know what's
on your plates. And then before you know what your
plates become a plotter, and effectively, I feel like I
(28:16):
am now living two totally separate lives, which is interesting,
and not crossing those two has been very hard. But again,
my ultimate goal is to be as happy as I
can be and to be the best version of myself
for myself and for everyone that I love, and this
is an important part of that. And so to be continued.
(28:44):
I asked Nikki if she's ever imagined telling her husband
about the affair and what that might look like. Yeah,
I do, actually, and now I'm starting to get emotional,
so I apologize it. Last year, when I first met
the man that i'm with, nell I said to my husband,
(29:05):
are you open to having a conversation about divorce? And
he acted so surprised, and I said, I'm not happy,
and I don't think you're happy either. You want someone
to be domestic and clean house all day and make
dinner for you, and you resent me because I worked
so much, and I resent you because you don't care
(29:26):
about sex. And I just think we deserve to be happy.
And he's like, well, I guess i'd be open to it.
He's like, but not now if you have some kind
of boyfriend on the side, And of course I lied
into no, I don't. That's how much this is about.
And he was kind of pissed her a couple of
days and he was just saying things like, you know,
it would be really sad if we split up. We've
(29:47):
we have a family, we've been together forever, and I
just can't imagine not being married. And this is why
I say he's oblivious, because this was October and he
has never brought it up again. He has never done
anything different, anything to keep me, anything to do anything
(30:07):
but just let time go by, and that's not willing
to keep doing that. And I think about so many
women I know that are are likely to be unhappy,
or maybe they've gain weight, or they don't feel great
about themselves, or their husbands aren't having sex the way
they want them to. And I think about how many
women are probably just silently suffering through monalogamous relationships or
(30:30):
marriages because they feel like they have to and they
don't know where to start, or they don't know how
they'll ever get out of it or have anything else.
And it's just it's such a problem of privilege. I
understand that there are what way worse things in the world,
but when it comes something that's terrible on any scale,
for any person who, no matter who they are, it's
(30:51):
a wasted life of not being happy. And I think
that's the worst thing that could happen to anybody. She's right,
don't We all just deserve to be happy. But happiness
is just one need that an affair can fulfill. Susan
Shapiro Barrish, who we spoke to earlier in this episode,
has interviewed hundreds of women about their affairs over the
(31:13):
past thirty years, and in her research, she's actually categorized
four different types of affairs based off the reasons that
women pursue them. Women have empowering affairs, sex German affairs,
self esteem affairs, and love affairs. When I talked to
women about empowering affairs, it was very new because suddenly
(31:37):
women felt that they were on a par with what
men had been able to do, you know, like a
husband who would go on a business trip and sort
of have fun on the side, and women were expected
to look the other way. And so these women are saying, hey,
I trade in the same currency as men. I earn
a lot of money, I travel when I need to,
I'm independent, and this is the type of are that
(32:00):
I choose to have. In terms of the sex driven affairs,
and those are I think, pretty self explanatory. The women
are really specifically saying, look, not enough sex, not exciting enough,
not intriguing enough. I want something very different than my
partner does, than my husband wants. The self esteem affair
(32:21):
has a lot to do with longevity. You've been married
five years, you have two children, You look in the mirror,
you're maybe close to forty, and you say, is that
all there is? Is this? It I don't feel really understood,
I don't feel very visible, and the lover makes these
women feel really alive, they feel really appreciated. In terms
(32:46):
of the love affairs, I've found those throughout my study
to be the most poignant because I'll interview women and
they'll say, my life was really fine. I loved my
husband and I, you know, loved our family. I met
someone online, I walked across the room at a party
(33:08):
and something changed me and changed the way that I
want to go forward. And then you know, women will say,
I'm in love with my lover, I love my husband still,
and then they're really caught. Susan's research made me think
(33:31):
more about Nikki's story. Her affairs started because she wanted
something different sexually, but they also changed along the way.
They made her feel empowered, improved her self esteem, and
her most current affair is for love. An affair might
seem to start for one reason, but people are complicated.
(33:53):
Life is complicated, and the motivations behind these affairs and
what they do for the people who have them are
very nuanced. Nikki is a perfect example of that. In
future episodes, we are going to hear from a lot
more women, many of whom are telling the story of
their affair for the very first time. We won't just
(34:15):
be learning about the details. We're also going to hear
how it changed them and why they took such huge
risks to feel more confident, sexy, fulfilled, and loved. We're
also going to be bringing in plenty of experts to
help us figure out what does all of this mean
(34:36):
and to answer a lot of questions. Are more women
cheating now or are more women talking about it right?
Because historically they have just face so many more consequences
compared to men. I think we need to take the
stigma out of all of this because infidelity is a
normal part of the sexual repertoire of the human female.
(35:01):
That's all coming soon. This is She Wants More. Thanks
for listening. She Wants More was inspired by the book
A Passion for More by Susan Shapiro Bearish. It was
adapted for audio by executive producers Merril Poster, Kara Pfeiffer,
and Susan Shapiro Bearish. She Wants More is hosted and
(35:24):
reported by me Joe Piazza. Jennifer Bassett is our lead
producer and story editor. Our sound design is by Jessica Crunchich.
Our theme was composed by Anna Stumpf and Hamilton Lighthouser.
Research was done by Erica Berlin. Our executive producers for
I Heart are Ali Perry and Nikki Eator. She wants
(35:46):
More as a production of I Heeart Podcasts. For more
podcasts from my Heart, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
I thought everything I wanted and needed the hottest sect
that I had ever had in my life, and I
thought it was interesting to recognize that, uh so, this
is how men do it. And then when I thought
about it, like why are men the only ones to
get to call the shops? That's Nikki. She's in her thirties,
(00:24):
she's a mom of two, and she's been married for
more than fifteen years. Nikki isn't her real name, and
you'll see why she wants to use a pseudonym. What
you're about to hear is Nikki telling the story about
cheating on her husband for the past twelve years. So
we agreed to meet up at a hotel I know
(00:45):
the hotel, and it was like instant Bark, instant Blaine,
the hottest sect that had ever had in my life,
hours and hours and hours of set. I'm Joe Piazza
when you're listening to she Wants More. I've spent the
(01:08):
past five years making a podcast about marriage called Committed,
and I loved talking to couples from all over the
world about their relationships. These couples told me everything about
their marriages, the good, the bad, the better and the worse.
But lately, I've been hearing another kind of story. More
(01:28):
and more of the women that I know have apparently
been having affairs, And at first I thought it was
maybe just my extended social circle, but I dug in
a little bit more and discovered that the rate of
infidelity among women has actually risen by about forty percent
since the early and the rate of male infidelity shockingly
(01:52):
has remained pretty much the same. So what is going on?
Are women really cheating more than they used to or
are they finally just talking about it more? And who
are these women and why are they doing it? That
is what I'm here to find out. I'm just worried
(02:18):
a little bit about quality. It sounds because I have
like the watchers going, I'm multi capting Magnelivania and like,
so I want to make sure the audio wasn't sad.
This is the beginning of my conversation with Nikki. I
told her that her audio was fine. We can hear
her perfectly well, and every woman listening to this we'll
(02:38):
understand that she's multitasking right now. Before we get back
to Nicki's affair, I wanted to go back to the beginning,
back to her marriage, back to the man that she's
been cheating on. So I met my husband when I
was funny. I was raised to marry a certain kind
(03:00):
of man and lives a certain kind of life. And
so we have been on paper and outside looking in
very happily married for fifteen years. But inside of our marriage,
although we do love each other, he is just kind
of a loop, not super dialed in, kind of would
(03:22):
rather just not bring things up than mouris rocking the
boat by talking about them out loud. I was really
struck by how similar Nikki sounds to a lot of
my friends. She's a mom like me. She has a
successful job, and she has this nice life that, like
she says, looks really great on paper, but underneath the surface,
(03:47):
something wasn't right, And I had to ask her what
changed in her marriage that made her choose to have
an affair in the first place. You know, when communication
starts to fail, sex isn't happening anymore. As you grow
from early twenties and well into your thirties and late
(04:09):
thirties and beyond, start to realize, well, this is actually
what I want, or I would have thought about that.
I didn't realize that this is what I needed in
a way, you recognize that you're different than you thought
you were, or maybe you've just grown and maybe your
partner or your spouse hasn't. And it's not really their
(04:31):
faults because you can't change who anyone is, and you
can't force someone to change. At the same time, you're
stuck with one of the biggest problems I think we
face as adults, and that's do I live a life
a stability, keeping family together, keeping routine the same, or
do I find a way to feel fulfilled, happy, sexually happy,
(04:58):
romantically happy, and all those things that we all know
life is too short to go without. Then Nicki finally
hit a breaking point when sex with her husband just
wasn't doing it for her anymore. So I began with
asking my husband for different things in bed. I wanted
him to thank me, pull my hair, do different things
(05:23):
like that, and he was, you know, agreeable, receptive. So
when it came down to the sheet, I'm not even joking,
he would just like give my butt like attack, and
so it makes you so embarrassed because you feel like
a well, I just made him feel uncomfortable or he's
not comfortable doing this, or maybe he thinks something's wrong
(05:46):
with me for wanting this. I mean, I feel like
hair pulling and but banking or fairly, I don't know.
Maybe it twisted vanilla, but they're not that wild. So
there was no way I was going to go deep
for you know than that once that failed attempt, but
I still talked about it. We have date nights over dinner,
and I talked about the things that I wanted, and
(06:08):
I think through all of our relationship together, you know,
I would always the initiator, always more sexually driven than him,
which I think is a different role to consider it
in a man anyway, However, that's a true story, you know.
And so once I became frustrated enough, I stopped initiating,
I stopped having the conversation. I was tired of hearing
(06:29):
myself talk and tired of getting nowhere and just going
through the same missionary motions. So Nicky did what anyone
thinking about having an affair would do in the digital age.
She googled it, and I popped a website called Ashley Madison.
It's a well known online dating and sex site for
(06:51):
married people who are looking to have affairs. I thought,
you know what, I'm just gonna get my talent and
create a profile. Who cares, No is gonna know it's me,
and let me just see what's out there. And so
I put a sexy photo of my mouth down to
(07:12):
my cleavage but not my face, and I filled out
as many things about myself that I was willing to
share that were true, and I just wrote an open
paragraph or two about what exactly I wanted. And it
was like a torrential downpour of potential men begging to
talk to me. Oh wait, I've got and I've got
to say, what did that feel like? Crazy? Because when
(07:37):
you're with the same person for fifteen plus years, first
of all, no one else has seen you naked, You've
never thought about being with someone else. You don't have
any self esteem of confidence when you start thinking, but
maybe not any, but very little, because it's like starting
from scratch again. Even though the steaks aren't super high
or not shopping for a boyfriend or a husband or
(07:58):
anything like that, but the idea of getting naked with
someone new was reasonally terrifying. So created this profile. I
watched hundreds of messages come in, and no one has
the time to read that many messages. So I would
quickly screen them either based on their photo or what
their profile had said, and the ones that I did
(08:20):
want to respond to. This is gonna sound so nerdy,
hopefully in a very hot way. I kept the spreadsheets
and all my spreadsheets or identifiers by their screaming and
things like consistency. If they said they were going to
talk about something, did they or did they message me
once and then fall off the face of the earth
(08:42):
to communication that they actually know how to talk to
a woman, because it's not enough to be hot or
look good naked, or even to have some kind of
amazing sexual skills. And so I screamed more than a
hundred men that made it to that point on the spreadsheets.
The spreadsheet was like the nerdy version of a Little
(09:05):
Black Book. I would say, this is definitely nerdy in
a hot way, by the way, total nerdy in a
hot way. Totally. Also, I imagine that a woman's spreadsheet
is much more rational and organized than a man's spreadsheet.
No offense, but I think most men at most would
have had a post it note or a scrap becauld
(09:26):
favor from a wallet. We'll be back after a short
break and we'll find out what happens when Nikki finally
starts meeting some of those guys on her spreadsheet, we're
back with she once more. At first, Niggi got a
(09:48):
lot of really porny messages, and she was shocked by these,
as she should have been. She'd been with the same
man for fifteen years. But anyone that's ever been on
any of these dating websites knows that if you put
yourself out there, you're going to get some pretty dirty messages.
And at first she wrote those things off. But then
(10:12):
Nicki got curious and she started exploring things on her own,
and that opened her up to a whole new world
of possible pleasure. Mm hmm. You would be surprised at
how early in the conversation some men will introduce these questions,
and so that puts you on this path of exploring
(10:32):
how do I make this happen to myself. You started
exploring different toys, like, for example, I was really afraid
of like platoral suction toys because I thought it would
hurt me. Now I barely go without it. So it
really did open up so much that you didn't even
know was out there exactly because I was so young
(10:52):
when I met my husband. And I was raised very traditionally,
very strict as the only child of my parents that
just do not want anything sexual or otherwise to come
into my brain. And so I lived a repressed life
until you know, late thirties, and so I had this
whole world out there I had no experience or knowledge of,
(11:13):
and I was just sick of it. And once Nikki
did finally feel sexually savvy and confident enough to meet
some of the more appealing men on her list, she
set it up so that no one would ever find
out what she was doing. She created a Google voice
number and a WhatsApp to make sure that none of
(11:33):
these conversations would ever be saved on her phone. And
then she just started talking to some of the men
that she was tracking on her spreadsheet. After that came
the next step, meeting them in real life. I down
colected to the top ten, and after video chatting to
(11:56):
verify identity, I met each of these ten men in person.
For some we went and had a cocktail, someone took
a walk in a park a couple of weeks for breakfast,
and I picked the best of her all based on
our chemistry, the quality of person I believed him to
be what he had to offer the affair, and he
(12:18):
was really respectful not only of me, but of my process.
And so we agreed to meet up at a hotel
and it was like instant spark, instant flame, the hottest
sect I had ever had in my life, hours and
hours and hours of sects, and such a masculine kind
(12:39):
is a progressive way that I had. My whole body
was craving for so long that I had nearly begged
my husband. My oblivious, barely paying attention, doesn't want to
talk about his husband. I begged him, and all of
a sudden it was writing from me. I couldn't believe it.
And I was so proud of myself in a way
(12:59):
that I did just follow all over this man and
just fall in love and have all the hard eyes
and I it's very mature about it, and I thought
it was interesting to recognize that, uh so, this is
how men do it. I didn't feel attached to him
at all. I got everything I wanted and needed, and
I gave him everything I wanted to as well, and
(13:19):
then that was it. And then when I thought about it,
like why are men the only ones that get to
call the shops. Why are they the ones who get
to have all their sexual pleasures to build? Even if
you watch porn, how many porn videos have you seen
that are all about the woman climax thing? Just like
(13:41):
the word a fair is typically associated with a man
having an affair and behind closed doors, it just makes
you want to laugh like it. Don't underestimate women because
we are capable of getting everything we want and doing
anything we can think of. NICKI knew that this was it,
this was what she'd been missing, and she ended up
(14:04):
meeting with the same man again and again. The first
time I met him was September twenty nineteen. I have
seen him so many times. We consider each other friends.
We talk openly with each other. He's been very supportive
and encouraging of me exploring and going on other dates,
(14:25):
and so I did. I've got a lot of dates,
and I've seen him specifically a lot of times, and really,
after a couple of years in this experience, I'm so
lucky that it was him the first time, because he
was so respectful of me, so kind, but also scorching
hot and my best xt ever. And is he married too?
(14:46):
He is? And how much do you talk about your spouses,
not a lot. We feel like we know. It's pretty
much everything that we needed to know. And unless one
of us is having an issue. I know his wife
has threatened to leave him few times, and so we
talked about that on his end, just as far as
giving support and talking things through. And funny enough, in
(15:08):
the beginning of this conversation we were talking about everyone
comes down to the line, what are you gonna do.
Are you gonna leave your kids so you can go
and get whoever and be free and clear about it,
or are you gonna keep your family together and find
a way to be happy? And this, for you is
the answer to keeping your family together, also being happy,
(15:31):
and also feeling fulfilled. Absolutely, And for Niki that means
keeping completely separate lives. She's essentially the home edit of
having an affair. She can put her family in one
bucket and her affair and another, and she organizes her
entire lifestyle so that the two things never cross streams.
(15:55):
We don't involve anything from our personal life with our
affair lives. We are not in position to run into
each other. We don't have mutual friends, we don't work
in the same industry, we're not going to casually see
each other on the sidewalk in an awkward way. We
quite literally have a completely separate life that no one
knows about. I don't know if you're a fan of
(16:15):
Nagan the Stallion, but in one of her songs, who says,
it's okay because I have another that'll do it if
you won't, And it brings me back to the conversation
with my husband of asking him to thank me and
pull my hair and talk to alreat eating me, and
all of these things. And this wasn't onto the next
(16:36):
because once you start growing your sexual exploration and adventuring
and experiencing getting what you want, it's uncharted territory. But
there's also really endless possibility. So until you've come to
a point of wanting to slow down or settle down
or so a different way, it's just like a tank
(17:00):
of gas that's fool and getting the keys to the
car handed to you every time you want to take
a ride. Do you think having the affairs makes you
a better wife and partner. I don't know about that,
but I will say that it makes me less resentful,
less spiteful. I don't have a lot of contention built
(17:20):
up in my chest, or stress or anxiety or any
kind of that negative cloud that kind of grows within
you when you go without for so long and you
start looking at this person like, why can't you understand?
Why can't you give me these things? And why are
we stuck in this marriage? When I deserve to be happy.
I deserved it, feel good and all of these things.
(17:41):
So having that room to breathe, it just makes you
less bitchy, for lack of a better words, There's less
resentment because I know that if I want to do
anything else, I'm going to do it. I'm more confident,
I am more self aware, I have better self esteem.
And it also bleeds over into a lot of other
(18:02):
areas such as a friendship, professionalism, my role at work.
Everything I do is different now because I'm different now.
How so how does it How does it plead over
into your professionalism and work? And how do you feel different?
When I walk into a room and I'm going to
give a meeting or maybe I'm speaking in public, I'm
(18:22):
not worried about what somebody thinks about what I'm wearing
or how I look, or if I am so stressed
out from being so sexually unfulfilled. That is showing on
my face, and I'm wondering if people are looking at
me asking themselves. I wonder how often she gets it.
You know, all the things that go through people's minds
that you really shouldn't concern yourself with, But when you're
(18:44):
so unhappy and so stressed over it, all of these
things just start to bring it down. But when you
become sexually fulfilled, you become more confident in your body
and how you feel naked, and how you make other
people feel and how they feel about you. Knowing that
you have the keys to the kingdom and you can
(19:04):
control it however you want. That's a big sense of power.
It could be a total ego trip if you let it.
So when I walk into a room, I'm not nervous anymore.
I know so much more about how men and women
think sexually than I ever could have imagined without this experience.
So I feel less stressed, less worried, I feel more powerful,
(19:28):
I feel more confident, I feel more in my real self,
and I'm just not afraid anymore. What do you feel
comfortable telling me about one of your wildest, greatest, most
fulfilling experiences. I think the wildest I was getting overwhelmed
with so many messages from so many men, and because
(19:51):
I always practice say sex and wasn't really in a
position to drive a group sex or gang bang scenario,
if you will. There was a day where I saw
four different men in the same day and I expect them,
all four of them, and it was amazing. Wow, I
(20:13):
was not expecting that answer. So four different men were
they were all of the experiences different totally in moment
one of them, I where it was like maybe twenty
minutes in and out and I was like, I see
you later, have great rest of your weeks. Like I
did not care. I didn't need to be held or
cuddled or kissed. I didn't need any of it. I
(20:34):
was able to then to shower, to take a meeting,
come back, have a dinner date, asked on again. It
was amazing. It was so cool because I got to
really be in the driver's seat, get exactly what I wanted,
and I just happened to feel sectually greedy that day.
And it's like, then such a power trip to be
(20:55):
able to command the sexual presence of people you desire
and have them to fill whatever it is you need crazy.
We'll be back with more from Nikki. After a short break,
(21:16):
we're back what she wants more. The trajectory for women
has been until the late twentieth century that we would
be good daughters, good wives, good mothers, good grandmothers if
we were lucky, and that was the arc. And what
contemporary women are saying is that with more choices, they
(21:41):
end up having the ability to finesse an affair and
the drive to finesse an affair if they so choose.
That's Susan Shapiro Bearish, her book, A Passion for More,
inspired this podcast, and she's been researching women and affairs
for more than thirty years. How do you think affairs
(22:03):
have changed since she started doing this in ninety years ago.
Are you seeing more affairs, less affairs, women being more
comfortable talking about them. What are the big changes that
you've seen. First of all, I do think there are
more and more affairs. I think that women have more agency.
I think that women are more self aware with every decade,
(22:25):
so they're really saying, well, what am I not getting
in this relationship? And how lucky I am to have
found this lover who can provide when I'm missing so
women are feeling more like they deserve to have an affair,
And of course I don't want anyone judged. You know,
this is just in the pie of life, and women
(22:47):
who have affairs, they're saying I want more. In fact,
I have a passion for more. Before talking to Susan
and Nikki, I'm not sure if I thought of an
affair as just another choice, But the more I think
about it, it just makes sense. As women throughout the
(23:08):
course of history, haven't we always gotten the short end
of the stick? Haven't we historically, and frankly even right now,
lacked the autonomy to make decisions about our own lives
and our own bodies. So is an affair just a choice?
A choice to feel happier, a choice to feel good,
(23:28):
the choice for more. But an affair doesn't happen in
a vacuum. It can always go further. And what happens
when that affair isn't just sex. It's a relationship that's complicated.
I decided to ask Nikki, you seem really good at
(23:51):
not getting emotionally attached, But has there been a time
when one of these relationships started to cross a line?
I think the way you know you cross the line.
It's like any other relationship. If you just start thinking
about that person constantly, you can't stand it. When you're
not talking or texting all you wanted to be with
that person, you've gone too far. And it definitely organically
(24:15):
happened with a man in New York, and honestly, I
don't know if it would have stopped or how it
would have stopped, but he got caught and it stopped abruptly,
and because I had feelings for him, it just was
so painful. And being in the long term relationship in
a marriage so young, that's something I hadn't really experienced before,
(24:38):
like grown up version of heartbreak. And it stopped, and
I so so shitty. And you know what else, It's
like the old saying, if you want to get over
one man, you have to get under another. And it
was so true. And I went right back to Ashley
Madison and got back on the horse. Nikki got right
back on the horse. She just wanted to have X,
(25:00):
but with the next guy she ended up getting way
more than she bargained for. And then last year, literally
was planning an appointment for a Wednesday afternoon, and this
was a Friday, and I said, I can't talk on
the weekend, but if you can video tell with me
on Monday, I can confirm my availability for Wednesday afternoon.
(25:24):
Quite business like, I got on what's up? I got
in this video call and the man staring back at me,
the connection of his eyes, the way he looked at me,
I was like, funk, I should have breast my hair.
Oh my gosh, guy. I don't know what it was
about him, because I wanted to be like such a
hard ass and I we're like, I haven't even breshed
(25:44):
my hair yet today. And I don't only care about
this video meeting because I'm just going through emotions with
you to see if I want to have sex. I
just stopped something different, and so we started talking NonStop
through that through video on the phone, which not stop talking.
And so we met that week. And I feel like
(26:06):
I have butterflies all over my body right now just
telling you this, because we've been involved since last August
September and we have had the most intense, dramatic romantic
relationship of my adult life, and I have no idea
what's going to happen. I feel like because I know
so much about so much of this whole world as
(26:28):
far as affairs and things, I have no idea where
it will go. I have let go of the expectation
of not being close to someone and not crossing lines
because rigid boundaries like that are really hard to follow.
And it sounds really good on paper, but being good
on paper isn't enough. That we know, and that's what
brought us here to this entire conversation. So now I
(26:51):
see him exclusively and we'll see what happened. Wow, And
so you're open to that if it came to you
were both in a place where you could leave your spouses,
you would with this person. Finally, be open to that,
I think so. And he's gonna he's already he's not
married anymore, and so it's I'm the one who is married.
(27:13):
And so now I'm spending a lot of time with
him and his because and we definitely talk about the future.
Not there yet, not been the easiest road for this relationship.
I just don't know where it will go. But I
feel like I have a lot of control and experience
under my belt to be in a good position to
(27:34):
make the right call when it comes time to it.
But you've met his kids, that's a big deal. I know,
of course, but he can't meet and he can't that
is that is a lot to be feeling right now.
You're going through a lot. It is a lot, and
it's I think one of the hardest things about it
is when it's really heavy and you know, I've got
(27:56):
that ball of anxiety and your stomach and that lump
in your throat and someone who everybody else in your
life doesn't know about it, so there's no one really
to talk to, and then people don't understand why you're
reacting a certain way because you don't really know what's
on your plates. And then before you know what your
plates become a plotter, and effectively, I feel like I
(28:16):
am now living two totally separate lives, which is interesting,
and not crossing those two has been very hard. But again,
my ultimate goal is to be as happy as I
can be and to be the best version of myself
for myself and for everyone that I love, and this
is an important part of that. And so to be continued.
(28:44):
I asked Nikki if she's ever imagined telling her husband
about the affair and what that might look like. Yeah,
I do, actually, and now I'm starting to get emotional,
so I apologize it. Last year, when I first met
the man that i'm with, nell I said to my husband,
(29:05):
are you open to having a conversation about divorce? And
he acted so surprised, and I said, I'm not happy,
and I don't think you're happy either. You want someone
to be domestic and clean house all day and make
dinner for you, and you resent me because I worked
so much, and I resent you because you don't care
(29:26):
about sex. And I just think we deserve to be happy.
And he's like, well, I guess i'd be open to it.
He's like, but not now if you have some kind
of boyfriend on the side, And of course I lied
into no, I don't. That's how much this is about.
And he was kind of pissed her a couple of
days and he was just saying things like, you know,
it would be really sad if we split up. We've
(29:47):
we have a family, we've been together forever, and I
just can't imagine not being married. And this is why
I say he's oblivious, because this was October and he
has never brought it up again. He has never done
anything different, anything to keep me, anything to do anything
(30:07):
but just let time go by, and that's not willing
to keep doing that. And I think about so many
women I know that are are likely to be unhappy,
or maybe they've gain weight, or they don't feel great
about themselves, or their husbands aren't having sex the way
they want them to. And I think about how many
women are probably just silently suffering through monalogamous relationships or
(30:30):
marriages because they feel like they have to and they
don't know where to start, or they don't know how
they'll ever get out of it or have anything else.
And it's just it's such a problem of privilege. I
understand that there are what way worse things in the world,
but when it comes something that's terrible on any scale,
for any person who, no matter who they are, it's
(30:51):
a wasted life of not being happy. And I think
that's the worst thing that could happen to anybody. She's right,
don't We all just deserve to be happy. But happiness
is just one need that an affair can fulfill. Susan
Shapiro Barrish, who we spoke to earlier in this episode,
has interviewed hundreds of women about their affairs over the
(31:13):
past thirty years, and in her research, she's actually categorized
four different types of affairs based off the reasons that
women pursue them. Women have empowering affairs, sex German affairs,
self esteem affairs, and love affairs. When I talked to
women about empowering affairs, it was very new because suddenly
(31:37):
women felt that they were on a par with what
men had been able to do, you know, like a
husband who would go on a business trip and sort
of have fun on the side, and women were expected
to look the other way. And so these women are saying, hey,
I trade in the same currency as men. I earn
a lot of money, I travel when I need to,
I'm independent, and this is the type of are that
(32:00):
I choose to have. In terms of the sex driven affairs,
and those are I think, pretty self explanatory. The women
are really specifically saying, look, not enough sex, not exciting enough,
not intriguing enough. I want something very different than my
partner does, than my husband wants. The self esteem affair
(32:21):
has a lot to do with longevity. You've been married
five years, you have two children, You look in the mirror,
you're maybe close to forty, and you say, is that
all there is? Is this? It I don't feel really understood,
I don't feel very visible, and the lover makes these
women feel really alive, they feel really appreciated. In terms
(32:46):
of the love affairs, I've found those throughout my study
to be the most poignant because I'll interview women and
they'll say, my life was really fine. I loved my
husband and I, you know, loved our family. I met
someone online, I walked across the room at a party
(33:08):
and something changed me and changed the way that I
want to go forward. And then you know, women will say,
I'm in love with my lover, I love my husband still,
and then they're really caught. Susan's research made me think
(33:31):
more about Nikki's story. Her affairs started because she wanted
something different sexually, but they also changed along the way.
They made her feel empowered, improved her self esteem, and
her most current affair is for love. An affair might
seem to start for one reason, but people are complicated.
(33:53):
Life is complicated, and the motivations behind these affairs and
what they do for the people who have them are
very nuanced. Nikki is a perfect example of that. In
future episodes, we are going to hear from a lot
more women, many of whom are telling the story of
their affair for the very first time. We won't just
(34:15):
be learning about the details. We're also going to hear
how it changed them and why they took such huge
risks to feel more confident, sexy, fulfilled, and loved. We're
also going to be bringing in plenty of experts to
help us figure out what does all of this mean
(34:36):
and to answer a lot of questions. Are more women
cheating now or are more women talking about it right?
Because historically they have just face so many more consequences
compared to men. I think we need to take the
stigma out of all of this because infidelity is a
normal part of the sexual repertoire of the human female.
(35:01):
That's all coming soon. This is She Wants More. Thanks
for listening. She Wants More was inspired by the book
A Passion for More by Susan Shapiro Bearish. It was
adapted for audio by executive producers Merril Poster, Kara Pfeiffer,
and Susan Shapiro Bearish. She Wants More is hosted and
(35:24):
reported by me Joe Piazza. Jennifer Bassett is our lead
producer and story editor. Our sound design is by Jessica Crunchich.
Our theme was composed by Anna Stumpf and Hamilton Lighthouser.
Research was done by Erica Berlin. Our executive producers for
I Heart are Ali Perry and Nikki Eator. She wants
(35:46):
More as a production of I Heeart Podcasts. For more
podcasts from my Heart, visit the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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