Having sex with multiple partners apparently saved “Silicon Valley” star Thomas Middleditch’s marriage.
Speaking with Playboy, Middleditch said that he asked his wife, Mollie Gates, if she would be okay with an open marriage shortly after their wedding in 2015, which he claims to have made their relationship all the more better.
“You and one of the Godzilla writers visited a swingers club with your partners during production. Are you and Mollie, your wife of four years, familiar with the swinging scene?” Playboy asked the actor.
“I don’t know how much I can say, because I don’t want my wife to be mad at me. Only after I got married was I like, ‘Mollie, I’m sorry, but we have to get nontraditional here.’ To her credit, instead of saying ‘F—k you, I’m out,’ she was like, ‘Let’s figure this out,'” he said. “To be honest, swinging has saved our marriage. We have different speeds, and we argue over it constantly, but it’s better than feeling unheard and alone and that you have to scurry in the shadows. By the way, it’s now called being ‘part of the lifestyle.’ The term swinging is old.”
Middleditch admitted that being “part of the lifestyle” is not something he was always interested in but that his sexual urges propelled him to it.
“I self-deprecatingly call myself a pervert, but that’s not what it is,” he says. “I just like it. I’m sexual. I’d always thought I was a romantic and that when I fall in love, that stuff fades away. It does for some years — enough to be like, ‘I should get married, and I’ll be different.’ But it’s part of me. If that’s part of your being and it feels important to you, find a way to explore it, because repression sucks.”
Middleditch said he hoped that his desires to have sex with other women would suddenly vanish after marriage. When they did not, he realized that he and his wife would have to come to some sort of an agreement. The “lifestyle” they lead is not always easy and even has some complications due to his being a celebrity, which means women throw themselves at him all the time.
“Personally, that’s one of the trickier elements of it all, because Mollie doesn’t get that and yet she has to witness it. I’m like, ‘Come on, what about this chick who’s obviously really into me?’ And Mollie will say, ‘Yeah, she’s into you. Where do I fit in?’ That question comes up,” he said. “There’s a lot of negotiation, and adding fame sometimes makes it easier and sometimes complicates things.”
The trick, according to Middleditch, is making sure that partner selection is both fair and safe so that everyone is in agreement.
“That’s the forever-changing landscape in our relationship, because it’s about everybody feeling safe. The internet is a possibility for meeting people, but Instagram f—ks up marriages,” he admitted “If your partner brings this very forward person from Instagram to you, you’ll be like, ‘Do you guys have a thing?’ Whereas if your partner bumps into someone and they start a conversation, it all happens in front of you.”
“It’s a game of inches on a minefield to try to predict who’s going to feel safe,” he said. “My first concern is Mollie. Anything that happens has to be run by the queen.”