There was a time when Star Jones and Al Reynolds seemed to be everywhere. The proposal came at the 2004 NBA All-Star Game. Then came the enormous w
There was a time when Star Jones and Al Reynolds seemed to be everywhere.
The proposal came at the 2004 NBA All-Star Game. Then came the enormous wedding, the vendors, the publicity, the photographs, the commentary and eventually the divorce.
But something else accompanied their relationship almost from the beginning: an extraordinary number of people who seemed convinced they knew something Star did not.
When the marriage ended, some of those voices essentially took a victory lap.
Here are ten lessons worth keeping about relationships and people who insist on being at your decision table.
1. A woman does not become foolish simply because a relationship ends.
Star Jones married Al Reynolds on November 13, 2004. She filed for divorce in March 2008, after roughly three and a half years of marriage. In announcing the divorce, Jones said she had made an error in judgment by allowing the media so deeply into her private life.
Notice what she identified as the error: inviting the public into something intimate.
That is different from saying, “I was stupid to love somebody.”
Relationships end. Marriages end. People discover incompatibilities. People change. Sometimes information becomes clearer with time.
A woman cannot make today’s decision using information she will not possess until three years from now.
Affirmation: I am allowed to make the best decision I can with what I know today.
2. “I told you so” is not care.
There had been public skepticism about this marriage from the beginning. When the divorce became public, one television segment actually presented it as one of the “least surprising” celebrity divorces and joked about an office pool predicting how long the marriage would last.
A woman is ending her marriage, and someone else is celebrating the accuracy of his prediction.
Sometimes people really do see trouble that we cannot see. Friends, sisters, mothers and people who love us may notice something important. Women should be able to hear concerns without surrendering ownership of our choices.
But concern sounds different from anticipation.
Someone waiting to say “I told you so” may be more invested in being proven right than helping you get somewhere safe.
3. Star’s appearance was already sitting at the table.
This part cannot be separated from the story.
Years later, Star wrote candidly that when she was heavier, she noticed how differently women were treated according to appearance. She remembered being treated as the “good friend” while other women were treated as potential girlfriends. She remembered side-eyes, smirks and backhanded compliments about having a pretty face.
And the always brilliant Star herself understood the cultural message surrounding her marriage.
In a 2006 interview, she said that when a woman is over 40 and overweight, people do not expect her to “get the guy of your dreams.”
That sentence tells us something important about the atmosphere surrounding this story.
Before people evaluated Al Reynolds, some had already evaluated Star Jones’s market value as a woman.
So when she had a glamorous courtship and spectacular wedding, disbelief about him could easily mingle with disbelief about her.
Women should be careful about accepting relationship advice that secretly begins with the premise, “Why would someone like him want someone like you?”
That is not discernment.
4. Losing weight did not purchase Star an exemption from misogyny.
There is an uncomfortable before-and-after story here.
Star was mocked when she was one size. Then she lost a tremendous amount of weight and became the subject of another enormous public conversation about her body.
ABC executives reportedly believed audience research showed viewers had been turned off partly by her dramatic weight loss and the wedding.
Star later disclosed that she had undergone gastric bypass surgery in 2003 and explained that she had been frightened and ashamed to discuss it publicly. She also acknowledged that she had been evasive about the procedure.
There are legitimate questions about honesty when a public personality discusses weight loss. But there is another lesson here for women.
Do not build your life around finally reaching the appearance that will make everybody treat you kindly.
That finish line moves.
Thankfully, Star was living her best smart, beautiful, and glamorous life at every size.
5. We still do not get to rewrite another person’s sexuality.
Rumors about Al Reynolds’s sexuality followed the couple for years.
In 2008, Reynolds publicly said he was not homosexual and described the professional and personal harm the speculation had caused him.
Years later, in 2017, Reynolds publicly identified himself as bisexual. More recently, he has said that he had been honest about his sexuality with his romantic partners, including during his marriage to Jones. That is his account; Jones has not publicly supplied a detailed account confirming or disputing what she knew privately.
Those facts do not give strangers permission to retroactively declare that every rumor was proven true.
Bisexual does not mean gay. Bisexual does not mean incapable of loving a woman.
And a former spouse’s later public disclosure does not prove that his wife was deceived.
We simply do not know everything that was said between Star Jones and Al Reynolds. And it is not any of our business. The choices of consenting adults with other adults isn’t our business.
That is where responsible people stop.
6. Women are often blamed whether they listen to outsiders or listen to themselves.
This is one of the nastiest traps.
If a woman leaves because everyone tells her something is wrong:
Why didn’t you trust your husband?
If she stays:
Everybody warned you.
If she questions him:
You’re insecure.
If she believes him:
You’re naive.
If she keeps her relationship private:
What is she hiding?
If she talks about it:
Why does everybody need to know her business?
Eventually a woman has to understand that there may be no decision that protects her from commentary. So commentary cannot be the compass.
Gather information. Observe behavior. Ask questions. Listen carefully. Give yourself permission to reconsider.
Then make your decision. Some people are going to talk either way.
7. You can admit where you went wrong without handing strangers ownership of your whole story.
Unsurprisingly, Star has been reflective about this period.
Years after the divorce, while talking with Joy Behar, she looked back at that spectacular wedding and said she wished she had spent as much time working on the marriage as she had on the wedding.
There is wisdom in being able to say that.
Star did not have to declare herself an idiot. She did not have to declare the entire relationship fraudulent. She could identify something she would do differently.
Women need room for that kind of mature revision.
“I would not make that choice again” is enough.
You do not owe anybody a public flogging before they will permit you to grow.
8. A woman’s professional identity should not disappear behind her relationship.
There is another piece of Star Jones’s story that celebrity coverage can obscure.
Before The View, before Al Reynolds and before that enormous wedding, Star Jones was an attorney and former prosecutor who became a television legal correspondent.
She did not become interesting when a man proposed to her.
She did not stop being accomplished when her marriage ended.
Women may choose to notice how easily our culture turns a woman’s relationship into the headline of her entire existence. Marriage can be important. Love can be important. Divorce can be devastating.
But none of them erase the person who existed before the relationship.
You had a life before somebody chose you. You still have one if they leave.
9. Women have the right to make their own choices, including choices other women would not make.
This may be the biggest lesson.
Another woman may see something you do not see. She may even be right.
Listen.
Ask questions.
Take concerns seriously, especially when someone identifies specific behaviors involving dishonesty, coercion, disrespect, isolation, intimidation or harm.
But there is a difference between offering a woman information and assuming authority over her life.
Star Jones chose Al Reynolds.
Then Star Jones chose divorce.
Both choices belonged to her.
That is adulthood.
Women’s autonomy cannot mean, “You are free to make whichever choice I approve.”
It has to include the far more difficult principle:
I respect your right to make a decision I would not make.
And when a woman discovers that her decision did not produce the future she hoped for, perhaps our first instinct should not be to reach backward for the receipt proving we warned her. Maybe we help her forward.
Because one day every woman will make a decision that looks clearer from the outside, especially once everyone knows how the story ends.
There is no wisdom in standing at the ending and pretending you knew every page.
There is wisdom in giving women good information, telling the truth when we see danger, respecting their intelligence, leaving the door open and remembering that dignity does not expire when a woman changes her mind.
You are allowed to choose.
You are allowed to learn.
You are allowed to leave.
You are allowed to begin again.
And none of those things require an “I told you so.”
