The Electron That Softened Her View on Marriage

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.