Four days after her Dec. 18 wedding to Richard John Toon, Laurie Stone wrote a Substack post telling her readers how she took one look at Mr. Toon 18 years ago and fell for him. “An electron bounced between us,” she wrote on “Everything is Personal,” her newsletter. That didn’t prevent her from feeling ambivalent as they stood before the judge in Hudson, N.Y., last month.
Her feelings were a product of the patriarchy, not the person, she explained. Marriage “is an institution I’ve always been opposed to,” she said. “The history of the institution has not been a good thing for women.”
Ms. Stone, 78, is a feminist and writer. For 25 years, until 1999, she wrote weekly columns about theater, books and standup comedy from a feminist perspective for The Village Voice. Her criticism and essays have been collected in books. She has written a novel and short stories and served as a critic at large on NPR’s “Fresh Air.” With Mr. Toon, 74, who has a doctoral degree in museum studies, she conducts writing workshops in Hudson, where they live, and around the world. Ms. Stone also coaches writers individually.
They met in October 2006 at Yaddo, an artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. And as soon as they started to talk, they could feel that electron bounce pulling them toward each other.
Mr. Toon, then a policy analyst at the Morrison Institute for Public Policy at Arizona State University, had arrived Oct. 4 for a three-week stay to work on a nonfiction book about museums. Ms. Stone, who arrived the same day, thought of her residency, which would last six weeks, as a continuation of a daily writing practice that wove its way through subjects from language to sex to politics.
No one introduced them at Yaddo. “People just talk to each other,” she said. But talking with Mr. Toon reframed the atmosphere. In addition to sequestering herself with her laptop in the interest of serious creative work, there was the added appeal of meeting with Mr. Toon. “There was something about his manner and looks,” she said. “He was cute, and he got cuter as time went on. We just immediately liked talking to each other.”
Binge more Vows columns here and read all our wedding, relationship and divorce coverage here.
By the second night of their stay, she liked him enough that his absence at dinner was a disappointment. “Yaddo is a formal kind of place, with vellum envelopes and thick cards you’re supposed to write out to let people know if you aren’t going to be at dinner,” she said. “When I saw the cards and that Richard wasn’t going to be there, I thought, how frustrating of you to leave dinner when you could be talking to me again.”
Mr. Toon, whose absence was the result of off-campus dinner plans he made days earlier, was then married to his third wife. But when he returned to Yaddo and resumed his conversations with Ms. Stone, he was careful not to cross a line. He had felt the electron bounce, too. “There was no footsie under the table,” Ms. Stone said. “Despite his four marriages, Richard is not a player.”
Mr. Toon grew up with an older brother and two younger sisters and their parents, who are now deceased, in Leicester, England. In 1968, when he was 18, he married his first wife. When they divorced in 1972, he got married again two weeks later.
At 23, he enrolled at the University of Leeds and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and religious studies, then earned a master’s degree in religious studies. He is an and has always been an atheist. But the anthropology behind religious faith intrigued him.
In 1983, the year of his second divorce, he was working toward a doctoral degree in religious studies at Leeds when he flew to New York to attend a conference. While there, he fell in love with the woman who would become his third wife. That marriage ended in 2009; he never finished the degree. He was 53 and living in Arizona when he completed his doctorate in museum studies from the University of Leicester. By then, he had spent more than two decades in New York and Arizona working as a policy analyst, research scientist, professor and consultant. He retired in 2019.
Ms. Stone was born in Manhattan. From ages 7 to 16, she and her older sister and parents lived in Long Beach, N.Y. “That was really idyllic,” she said. The family returned to Manhattan and settled in Midtown when she was in high school at Woodmere Academy, now known as Lawrence Woodmere Academy, having had their fill of the beach. Both of her parents and her sister have since died.
After she studied English at Barnard College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree, she earned a master’s degree in English literature from Columbia a year later, in 1969. Kate Millet, one of her teachers at Barnard, had helped her figure out a way forward as a thinker. “She turned my life around,” she said. “She liked my mind, and I adored her. I became involved in the women’s movement.”
Like Mr. Toon, she was married before she was 20. “I knew I shouldn’t get married, and I did it anyway,” she said. In 1966, at age 19, she and a boyfriend she had been living with found an apartment in Manhattan whose lease they were too young to sign. Her father agreed to co-sign if they married.
“I looked inside myself and said, Laurie, you know this isn’t going to last,” she said. “And I said, thank God this isn’t going to last.” In 1975, she was divorced.
Unlike Mr. Toon, she hadn’t married a second or third time when the two met at Yaddo. And though she was attracted to him, she wasn’t interested in a dalliance with a married man. “Everyone knows about artist colonies,” she said. “People have affairs.” But “by 60, my feeling was, have affairs, but don’t screw with people’s lives. Make sure they’re not married.”
The instant attraction didn’t loosen its grip, though. Ms. Stone had gotten in the habit of visiting a shared computer room first thing in the morning. On Oct. 18, her 60th birthday, Mr. Toon unexpectedly turned up there. “He looked at me and said, ‘Do you want to walk with me?’” she said. “I knew it that second. Boom. We were done.”
The swishing sound their puffy coats made as they brushed each other set the tone for their walk. “The swish told us, oops, it’s happening. And it happened.”
Their first kiss happened that day in her room. “It advanced from there,” she said. Mr. Toon was leaving the following week. She didn’t know if they would keep in touch. But the morning after he left, she woke up to find a five-page email from him that included a reference to the Leonard Cohen song “In My Secret Life.”
“It was a beautiful narrative story that was funny and full of life,” she said. A friend who was also at Yaddo, the photographer Suzy Kunz, told her the email meant he wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Ms. Stone. She was right.
Mr. Toon does not try to justify his affair with Ms. Stone. He feels there is no way of justifying any affair, really. “You just do what you do, and people get hurt,” he said. When he returned to Arizona, he told his wife what had happened, and they separated about a week later.
In May 2007, Ms. Stone moved in with Mr. Toon in Scottsdale, Ariz., for the summer. The beauty of the desert wasn’t evident at first glance, as they whizzed by strip malls and roadside condos. When he pulled his car into a gas station, she was thinking, “This is a nightmare.”
“But I stayed, and basically that tells you how much I loved him,” she said.
She always intended to come back to New York. In 2019, after more than a decade in Arizona, they returned. But not to the one-bedroom apartment on the Upper West Side she had held onto. Hudson had appealed since her days as a theater critic when she covered shows in the nearby Berkshires. They bought a house there.
Through the years, Mr. Toon had sometimes reminded Ms. Stone that being legally married offered tax and medical benefits. He wasn’t inclined to pass himself off as the perfect husband, though. “I wouldn’t trust anyone who’s had as many marriages as I’ve had,” he said, joking.
But as her Substack subscribers know, Ms. Stone’s love for him hasn’t wavered. “Richard and I have already lived together for 18 years, knowing how the other likes their tea, whether to add Epsom salts to the bath water, if it’s OK to straighten the papers on Richard’s desk (never),” she wrote on Dec. 17.
Her decision to marry him “came out of the blue,” she said. “It’s something about the emotional attachment I feel.” On Dec. 10, Mr. Toon said, she opened the door to his home studio and said, “I think we should get married.”
“He said OK, and there weren’t really any follow-up questions,” Ms. Stone said.
On Dec. 17, they drove to the clerk’s office in town to sign a marriage license. At 4 p.m. the next day, they were standing before Michael Howard, a Columbia County judge, with a police officer and two lawyers, all strangers, as witnesses. Ms. Stone wore one of Mr. Toon’s white shirts over tights and a scarf given to her by a friend; Mr. Toon wore a suit jacket with his everyday trousers.
She had thoughts about the standard ceremony Judge Howard planned for them. “When he read the word ‘holy,’ I said, ‘Is that with an ‘h’?” she said. He said yes. “I said, ‘What! No holy! No metaphysics!’” The judge smiled and crossed out the word.
Before he pronounced them married, Judge Howard read a passage familiar to wedding watchers: “I promise to love and cherish you, in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, for richer for poorer, for better for worse, and forsaking all others, keep myself only unto you, for so long as we both shall live.” Ms. Stone had thoughts about that, too. “I thought, no one in the history of promises has ever said yes to one word of this with an untroubled conscience,” she said.
Still, when they left the Columbia County Courthouse married, she described her mood as happy. Several weeks in, that hadn’t changed. “I’m amazed I’m not unhappy,” she said. “I think marriage worked a charm on us.”
ON THIS DAY
When Dec. 18, 2024
Where The Columbia County Courthouse, Hudson, N.Y.
Online Salutes The reaction to Ms. Stone’s Dec. 22 Substack post, “Hitched,” about her sudden decision to marry, was as unexpected as the wedding. “Normally, people talk about themselves in the comments,” she said. “But 700 people liked the picture, and a lot just straightforwardly said ‘Congratulations.’ It made me happy to be promoting happiness in other people.”
Conflict Resolution In addition to working a charm on them, Mr. Toon and Ms. Stone said marriage may be making them nicer to each other. “The other day we backed away from a fight, like two dogs deciding not to drink the poison water,” Ms. Stone said.
Happiest Hour After the wedding, the couple was joined by a friend, Kam Belamy, for happy hour drinks at Savona Trattoria and Bar, a favorite local restaurant.
The post The Electron That Softened Her View on Marriage appeared first on New York Times.
