Episode 124: A Second Marriage at 78

Suzanne Noble: I'm very excited to welcome our new sponsor, Higher Nature, who have created Rekindle, which I'm currently trying out and is working a treat. A 100% natural libido-enhancing supplement for women, which contains clinically backed ingredients to give your sex life a boost, and who doesn't want that? Hi, this is Suzanne Noble, and you're listening to Sex Advice for Seniors. And some of you may know that this podcast is actually distributed every week on Substack. And as a result of that, I've become quite active on Substack, which I'm really enjoying. I just think it's a great platform. I'm meeting loads of amazing people, one of whom is somebody that I've been following for a little while, and she is an author called Laurie Stone. She's written 6 books, most recently streaming now, Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening, which was longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award. And her Substack is called Everything Is Personal. And you may wonder, what has all of this got to do with sex advice for seniors or anything to do with older people. Well, Laurie is an older person herself, and recently she and her partner decided on a whim to get married. And I'm always curious when people decide to do stuff like that. So here I am today talking with Laurie, and we'll be talking about that and a whole bunch of other stuff. So welcome, Laurie, to Sex Advice for Seniors.

Hi, Suzanne Noble. I'm so happy you— you're— we're doing this because I liked you when we talked on the phone. I don't consider myself an older person 'cause I don't like that category, but whatever. It's your party and I'm a guest at your party. Yeah, yeah.

I'm okay with the word older. I use the word olders, which is something, a word that Ashton Applewhite actually coined, who wrote a really good book called "This Chair Rocks." And you know, I don't consider my, you know, I'm 63 years old. I know you're a little bit older than me and I—

A lot older. A lot older. And I think, I just think the category, you know, creating categories of any kind of biological framework is not my, it's not for me. I'm not entering, I'm not going in the box, but whatever. I can't stop anyone from thinking I'm in a box. I'm just not going in the box. Yeah.

No, that's cool. And I'm cool with that. And you did something that was clearly very outside the box, at least in my world where I definitely live outside the box when it comes to relationships. But you You took the decision to marry your partner, Richard. Yes. Very recently and quite quickly. And I'm curious to know what that decision was all about.

I have no idea. It was the weirdest— That's what I really like about it. I have— We don't know. Like, why did we do this? What are we doing? Anyway, however, okay, so do you want me to tell you a little of the narrative? Yes. You know what, I think that Richard had been saying for years and years, not as a kind of pressure to marry or advertisement for marriage, just as some part of the reality, which was if we were married, you, Laurie, would save, you know, a lot of money. We could do taxes together, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I would say, it's not worth it to me because I don't believe in marriage. And I wouldn't feel good doing something, you know, that had to do with this kind of conformist activity and the, you know, and the understandings of what the married female human is in culture and society. And historically, I wouldn't feel good about enlisting in that, in that group. I don't want to go in that box, basically, in a sense, you could say. And then I suddenly saw a kind of wonderful blizzard of dollars with little wings on them fly into my vision. And I love money and I never get it. I never can somehow as a writer get enough of it or whatever that even means. It's absurd. But anyway, I like the idea of this vision of this money flying around with little wings. And I thought, "Oh, I could get some more of this." Maybe it's okay in some weird way. So the real kicker was, um, it turned out that Richard gets about two-thirds more in Social Security than I do. So our ages are— he's 74 and I'm 78. And, um, it turns out that one issue was if we married within that 2024 time frame, and it was December, we would still get the benefit of having been married in 2024. So we tried to hustle it to make sure we could do it still within the 2024, which we could do. And then the other thing, it turned out that was in a year, I could apply for his amount of Social Security, which doesn't take anything from his payment. I think I just get the same amount. I know, who even dreamed of this? And then you might ask, well, why were you willing to be a whore? Not something that I'm unwilling to be in certain circumstances now, you know, as opposed to earlier. And I think it felt less— something had shifted in me. So time does pass and one experiences oneself moving through time and space, of course, and it changes. Whether the changes are age-related or not is not going to be knowable. But what We do know that there is change, there is time, and these things occur. So one of the things that occurred was I realized I didn't really give a fuck about what anyone thought of me doing anything. It had lowered its pressure sense. And that the bigger category of annoyance and misunderstanding, misidentification of me, had moved from the possibility of female conjoined with male in state, you know, understood, blah, blah, blah, to old lady, you know, old female human, was so much more of a kind of box that I was actively resisting than these other things. And I thought I could get the money, basically. However, it's not— it turned out that it made us happy. It made us happy a little bit. We didn't really know why, but we noted that it did. And then it made every— a gazillion people we didn't even know really happy. And that felt good because I— okay, so at first I said, let's get married, you know, I'll get all this money and let's not tell anyone. And then that felt like so dishonest and not at all how I've ever lived my life. And Richard didn't care one way or the other. And then suddenly I wrote about it on Substack and he said, how come? Wait, I thought it was supposed to be a secret and now you're telling everybody. And I said, You're right. Sorry I didn't mention it ahead of time, but I was stuck. You know, like, this was the most interesting thing that had happened recently. I had to file a piece and I was like, okay, well, why about that? So that's what happened. It was like an expedient. But I don't actually think any of the things I'm talking about are— explain or underpin lots of other emotions that have since surfaced, right, or been kicked up. So one of those Tell me if I'm saying too much. Is this still— Oh, it's interesting. So back to the narrative. So one of the things was like, oh, everyone's so happy for us. And then I was very suspicious and I didn't like— I liked it. I liked the attention, but I was afraid, of course, always that it was misattention. You're like, oh, they're happy, but they're congratulating us. Like somehow this is an accomplishment or achievement or we finally surrendered and we're now in the fold. And the Times piece that was done about us had that flavor to it in the headline, which very much pissed me off. It said something like— okay, I'm jumping ahead, but The Times wound up doing— once I told people we were going to do this thing and then we had done it, I wrote a Substack post called Hitched. And so as a consequence of that, one of the writers who writes the vows section in The New York Times contacted me and she said, "Would you be interested in me doing a Vows piece about you and Richard?" Again, the dollar things fluttered into my mind. I was like, "But the New York Times, they will advertise me and my name will be around and I'll get more subscribers and a certain number will become paid subscribers from just being in the New York Times." I thought, well, hang on. Now, the other thing, the other bait and switch aspect to all of this I had also been asked a couple of weeks before all of this happened to write a piece for the New York Times Book Review. And then the book that I was asked to write about created a certain kind of drama for me. And I wrote a piece I knew there was no chance in hell that the Times would ever publish. So when I thought I was going to write a piece for the Times, I, you know, again, the dollars, the wings, that flew out, that had to fly away because I knew the Times wouldn't publish what I wrote. I will be publishing it on my Substack anyway. So there is Tammy Lagorse who says, "Can I do the vows thing again?" Yes, yes, of course. Why not? Who cares? You know, again, you know, like advertise me, promote me. I'm all about the Substack. Just get those people there, read away, pay me to live better, you know, by subscribing, all of that. And then the headline, Tammy did a good job. Tammy did good. But the headline, they kept trying to sort of fold us into some framework of what a vows piece is. And it was a lot of language that, you know, we had to say, "No, I don't think so." You know, like they even used the— in one draft, there was the word elope. And I said, "Tammy, please, there's no eloping here." Yeah, we did get the license. And then the next day, we found a judge and got married. That did happen. But it wasn't— it was no plan. This was not what you— it was not a marriage, it wasn't a wedding, it wasn't any of those things. And in the ceremony, I hadn't really given any thought to what the judge would say except for one thing, using the words husband and wife, which we said ahead of time, just say married people. But there was all kinds of other language during the ceremony, and I kept stopping to line edit the judge. And he was very game, he was a very jolly guy, and he was having a good time. It was all like a party. It was like an office party because we had to get witnesses in from the hallway, you know, these two lawyers in coats and then one of the police officers, you know, were our witnesses. It was great. Anyway.

Film unfolding here. I hate to say it.

What?

The film is unfolding before my very eyes here.

So the judge says the word holy at one point and I stopped and said, is that with an H? And he said, yes. And I said, oh no, no, no, that can't be. There's no metaphysics here. We're not, we're not, that is not where we are, who we are. But anyway, it happened. And then he got to the part where he took, he took the holy out and then he got to the part where forsaking all others. And I said, are you, are you fucking kidding me? And then Richard had already said, yeah. So I got to that and it was almost over. And I said, okay. You know, that was basically said it like, really? Okay, I guess, you know, and it worked. So then we kissed and we went out and had drinks. So, but here's the thing, it's been almost 4 weeks. So this Wednesday is, you know, tomorrow. Oh yes, today is actually the 4 weeks because it's because we got married on a Wednesday on the 20th, on the 18th of December.

Wow.

And so, so today is the 4-week, well, tomorrow will be the 4-week anniversary. And things are, we're like trying to be nicer to each other is how I would put it. And maybe moving a little bit more quickly through our, you know, very, very well-rehearsed and dramatized arguments. You know, we got them down, we know how to do them. You'd think we would either avoid them or go through them more quickly since we're so good at them for 18 and a half years. But no, we were like, Very idiotic, so stupid. And but, you know, I think we're going more quickly to, let's not do this. You know, do we really want to stay in this mood? Can we move to another mood? I'm a very fast mood swinger. You know, like, I am really, I'm going to kill you. And okay, now let's have a cookie. But Richard's like, no, you know, he's still stuck on the rock of resentment, you know, and he's still, you know, like the islands of You know, I don't know, he's just going to hold on to, you know, just to the, to the town of Umbridge, right? There's no getting him off right from the town of Umbridge. So, um, I try, I bring my little carts up with the horses. Can we go in there? No, he's going to hold on to it. So I think he's more willing more quickly. I wish I could say that as a consequence of now being married people I was less provocative of producing these umbridges he goes into, but I'm not. I'm still as awful as ever. And, uh, we're— that's it. I mean, otherwise, I think we're— oh, and I also think we really like it. So we're happy that we got married. I really don't know why. It's just a mystery. But I also think it has something to do with feeling more secure, you know.

Um, yeah. On a deeper level, right?

I don't know. It feels, it feels, you know, practical in the sense that he's a type 1 diabetic and he's practically a lifelong one. And, um, and so he's immunocompromised. Traveling, he's English. So, you know, the whole issue of what's going to happen for the next 4 years has been in our thoughts. We thought we were probably going to go to England to live. If we couldn't bear staying here. And now I don't know, we just don't know. But traveling, um, we looked into, you know, just being domestic partners was also a way to— for me to emigrate there. All of that's still, you know, on the boards. But hospitalizations— he got a very bad case of a norovirus thing last year, and he had to go in the hospital for a couple days, and it was really bad. Nothing, you know, nothing changed in terms of my access. We live in Hudson, it's a really small place, and people are very warm and it's not like being in New York City and dealing with these kinds of, you know, situations. But nonetheless, you could be somewhere else and have to deal with them. You could be in a place you don't live in Europe and being, you know, legally married, I think anyway, the thing that came to mind when I thought about it ahead of time was more like I can hold Richard more firmly to life. This is ridiculous. It has no meaning. There is metaphysics there. Having a thought like that and coming up with an image like that is writerly and makes— it has no real practical reality to it, but it was a feeling and it was a thought, so I can say that.

Yeah, I mean, look, I was— I have so many thoughts, but most recently I met someone in her 50s who's just getting married, and she said the response that she's had from people when she's announced it has been very interesting. Some people have said, well, someone has to.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, congratulations. And my response was, having had a partner who I wasn't with him, but I was still very close to him, who sadly died a couple of years ago. I know that as he was going through cancer, I wasn't allowed any access at the hospital. They wouldn't speak to me and they wouldn't tell me, um, what was going on. And he was still very, very present in my life. And had we been married, that circumstance would have been very, very different.

Yeah, that's really awful that that happened to you. It's so awful.

I know, it just made me reflect, you know. I mean, it just— I'm not in a situation with anybody where I would get married to somebody, but I suspect there are aspects of it purely for practical reasons, which I know is not very romantic. But as I've heard you say, some of the reasons why we do these things are about financial security, you know, right? Some of them are about having access to our partners when, you know, they may be struggling from health from a health point of view and being able to get access to it. Like, there are real consequences, sadly, of not being married. And that's one of the things that has struck me around when I have suddenly been in this circumstance where I just thought it was a given that I would just be able to ring up and say, oh, you know, he's, he's, he's living in this place and I just want to know what's going on here because, you know, we spend 8 hours a day together. Could you just help me out here? And they're like, I can't talk to you. Sorry.

You know, so that's just so bad.

That kind of sucked. And I, so I do understand the, sometimes there's the romantic idea. Sometimes there's a financial thing. But when I started mentioning to this particular woman about some of the practicalities, she looked at me and she said, I hadn't considered any of that. And that's not why I'm doing this.

Romantic idea. She was doing it.

She was doing it from a very romantic point of view, and that was her reason, and I totally get that. But all I was saying was that we do this for all different kinds of reasons, and none of them are any less valid in my mind anyway to any of the reasons, whatever reasons that we choose. I mean, you did get married at 19 to—

yes, and that was interesting. And I did write about this because— but I didn't want to, and I knew I knew that it was the wrong thing to do, but I did it anyway. And I've done many things in my life where I knew, "Don't do this," and then done it. Many, many different kinds of things. So that wasn't the first and only. It wasn't the first time I had done something I didn't want to do. I knew I shouldn't. It's more that. I shouldn't do this, but I'm going to do it. Those were the two sort of opposing sentences that simply were adjacent. There were no conjunctions like "but" and, you know, just there was It was an and, yes. I don't want to do this and I am going to do it.

I know that contradiction is kind of a central theme in your writing that you said that. So I don't expect anything less of you, Laurie.

But this was different. I did want to do it. I did. I did want to do it and I did do it. So, so, but it didn't change my attitude toward the institution of marriage or the unfairness of people needing that imprimatur, which links you to all of these other, you know, male dominant and patriarchal frameworks in order to simply see people in the hospital. I oppose all of it. I wish I had all of that without, you know, other people had it. I don't want the privilege of something that other people have to or can't even get to, you know, because they don't have the capacity.

No, I agree.

There's another element. There's still all of that said, all of that notwithstanding, all of my opposition to marriage as an institution, you know, remaining in place. What I was going to say earlier is in the Times piece did this kind of dirt to me, a dig. I mean, they probably wouldn't see it that way, but I did, which was to say, in the headline for the piece about us, which was big and very jolly and very sweet in many, many ways. It said an electron, meaning that passed between Richard and me at Yaddo, an electron softened her views on marriage. They did not. In no way has anything been softened. And I wrote back to the Times and I said, you make it sound like my feminism lost its erection. And let me tell you, my feminism is remains rock hard. And I don't know that the Times is smart enough to understand the image, but maybe. Yeah, like, don't fuck with me about that stuff. You know, you didn't get me into the fold. You didn't— I didn't capitulate. I didn't compromise. And there seems to be a sweetness dividend, is what I can say. And I don't know where it comes from. Maybe it's just people liking us, or we saying to each other, We love each other and we're not going anywhere. Something like that. And, you know, in a more formal way, as a declaration in front of other people, even though no one else was there. But in a way, because we publicize so much— I do, I publicize so much of my life— that's a kind of public declaration.

Well, that was going to be one of my questions, was that you said that you really enjoy writing about your changing feelings and How do you plan to incorporate your experiences from this marriage into your writing? Are there any plans?

No, there are never plans. There are no plans. I don't work that way as a writer. I work along the concept of the garden of forking paths. I write a sentence and then the possibility of that sentence producing an array of other sentences comes into my thoughts. And then I think about— it's very technical, you know, in a sense. I'll give you an example. We had lunch the other day with these two people up here in the country, but I have to find what I wrote. Can I find it easily? Maybe it's easier on this other computer. Hang on. I just have to find the wording and you'll understand. I mean, it'll be a good example, but just give me one second. Oh, here it is. Oh yeah. So Richard and I have a practice in the morning. We often— he'll bring coffee up. I'm working in our bedroom these days because it's just warmer and it's very cold where we live and it's beautiful and the light's great. And so he'll come up with coffee and then he'll sit and write in a notebook and I'll We write together. We write together to whatever prompt comes into our thoughts. And so often it will be, you know, what's— what's— what can I grab onto? And we're— we're hot and heavily rewatching Homeland now. So I'm very involved with Claire Danes in my thoughts most of the time. But anyway, we went to this lunch, and so the lunch had happened the day before. And the first line I wrote was, yesterday, where we visited a horse walk through the living room. Okay, so what happened actually was there was a horse. It did not walk through the living room, of course. It was outside the windows. But the writer is immediately going to think— I didn't think. I just simply put the horse in the house. And then once the horse was in the house, you have to think, well, you put a horse in the house. Well, what's going to happen then? You know, is it going to knock over furniture? Who is the horse? And of course, eventually, by the third or fourth paragraph— this is a tiny little piece. Let's see, where does it go? Okay, so then the narrator talks about having visited this house once before, very far in the past. And then at the end, the last paragraph is, yesterday I was the horse moving through the living room, careful not to knock over tables and chairs. I was the horse without a thought about things beyond my life as a horse. Everyone agreed we didn't know how we were going to live the next 4 years. It looks like I am going to move through houses, careful not to knock over things, then move out to a snowy field where my horsehair will keep me warm and where I will leave small hoofprints in the snow as everyone waits for spring. Okay, so obviously what happens is you put a horse in a house, you gotta think more about the horse, the house, and what's right. Okay, so that's how I write. That's how I write everything. Just, you know, you make something up and then you think about, well, what are your obligations to this thing you've made up? And then it comes. It doesn't— it's not planned. It's a way of working that I, that I help other people learn to practice, um, as a you know, as a person who gives workshops and things, and Richard and I do together on these Zoom conversations that we, that we guide every once a month. But yeah, so I haven't— so yeah, how will the marriage— the marriage will always be there. The marriage will then be the horse, you know, will be with horse. Yeah, of course.

Yeah. And hopefully you won't knock over too many tables or work, anything else, and everything will go relatively undisturbed. And that will be— and that will be lovely. And that would be great. And you know what, because we're sort of— we're sort of coming up to that point where we close out, but I— you reminded me, of course, that one of the— and I would— and I'd like to promote this because I know that one of the things that you do, and you just mentioned it before, that people are, are able to come to is as part of your Substack offering and as part of being on the platform, you offer these workshops. And I'm really curious to know how that operates. That's— I'm planning on going to the next one, which I think is on the 25th.

The 25th of January is a Zoom conversation. So there are two things that Richard and I offer in a partnered practice. One are these Zoom conversations, and the one that's coming up up on January 25th. Anyone who's a paid subscriber to Everything Is Personal can come to these. You just have to send me an email and say, "Please put me on the list," and then I create a big list and then they get a link just a few days before, just as normally people do. And that new— the one that's coming up on the 25th of January, they're once a month, is on taking risks. So it could be taking risks in writing, but it doesn't have to be. And in terms of taking risks in writing, it might be for some people content. There's a lot of risk in certain kinds of things they want to write about, but they have anxiety about. And for other people, the risks are formal. You know, what kind of work do I put out? Is it intelligible? You know, my work is very, you know, um, sometimes it's, it's much— it would, it might be under the category of experimental writing, although it's extremely accessible. I use I use language and syntax and grammar in eccentric ways, for example. So that becomes something that, you know, people could say, "Well, why do you do it? What do you get out of it?" You know, so there are all kinds of conversation that arises. And these are interactive. So even though people, there are a lot of people come with the risk one, it turned out people really wanted to air their sense of where they wanted to take more risk or they were afraid of taking risk. And so we might have a whole series series on this because we already did one and it prompted us to do number two. So that's coming up on January 25th and anyone is welcome to come to that, to sign up for it. You can't just come, you have to sign up. And also you have to be a paid subscriber. The paid subscription for me annually is very, very low. It's under $50 and it's only $3.75 a month, you know, and you can unsubscribe. So, you know, it's a very low bar financially to get in. But because I have a lot of readers, I'm operating— my idea is not to have a paywall ever and not to create that opposition or obstacle to the content of the pieces. It's a purely literary publication. Lit Hub named it one of the 7 best literary publications on Substack. There are a lot of writers on Substack. So lucky. So good for Elle Stone. She got— and I didn't even know the person who wrote about it. So if, you know, if you're interested in writing itself, and also it's feminist and there are— and Substack is really rife, I should say, lousy with feminists. And it's so exciting and interesting to me because I will post some similar things on Facebook. I get many, many more reactions to overtly feminist. I just wrote a piece about Alice Munro's daughter, Andrea Skinner, in the most recent Suzanne Noble issue. Yeah, well, you know, but that's my take on Rachel Aviv's piece in The New Yorker was, you know, was really looking at it from a different point of view from the way that she did. And so, you know, the Substack offers me the opportunity to publish what probably other people wouldn't publish of mine, even though I do get published by other people all the time. But I love the freedom of that and I love the fact that people want to read it. So, So come, please come.

Yeah, yeah, no, I want to. And I think, you know, risk is also another topic in, in all of this, right? Because whether you're getting married and because you decide at whatever age you are you just want to, or you decide like me you never want to get married, or maybe I will, who knows? I don't know. And I don't know from day to day what's going on with my with my situation in when it comes to love and relationships. But it's fine, it's good, it's all good. It just goes with the flow, which is fine.

Yes.

But yeah, but it's been, it's been so lovely to talk to you, and I've really enjoyed our conversation. And I encourage everybody to check out Laurie's Substack, which is called Everything Is Personal. It's really fantastic. And of course Hopefully you're already checking mine out, but you may be listening to this on some other platform like Spotify or iTunes or something, or Pocket Cast. So come on over to Substack and check us out. We would really appreciate that. Thank you so much, Laurie.

One more thing. I'll just add one tiny thing. You can— you don't even have to remember Everything Is Personal. You can just remember lauriestone@substack.com. It will take you to me as it will to Suzanne's. Suzanne Noble@substack.com will also take you to her site. Just to say that. Thank you so much for having me. I love talking to you, and I wish we lived closer.

Me too. But I'll hopefully be coming to New York this year because my son promises he's going to fly me over, so you never know. Yay! Yay.