Imagine Having a New Husband Daily
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Lauren is a single woman in her early thirties living in a flat in London. She comes home from a hen (bachelorette) party for her best friend, Elena, pleasantly drunk and is shocked to find a man in her home! As she pulls out her cell phone to call the police, she sees that the lock screen on her phone is a photograph of herself with this man! Further confusing her is the fact that the walls in her entry way are blue instead of gray and that there is a rug on the floor that was never there before. A wedding photo on the wall featuring her and this man as bride and groom seals the deal. This guy is the husband she never knew she had!
Before she can quite figure things out, he happens to go up into the attic to change a light bulb and when he comes down, more than the light bulb has changed. He is an entirely different guy! Testing things by telling him she just heard a noise in the attic, he climbs back up there, only to have a third man, a third husband, come back down those steps.
The changing of husbands every day or few days is the core of this book.
By the halfway point, Lauren guesstimates that she has had one hundred and sixty husbands. In every case, she is able to scroll through her phone to see photos of their history together. She is able to see the things they have texted each other about. She is able to see texts from her friend Elena and from her sister Nat to have a sense as to what they have to say about the husband. And a neighbor, Toby, is always there to tell her things as she subtly asks him about her life. The couple of times she tries to tell someone about the attic, they don’t believe her.
I should also mention that there are always changes to the flat as the husbands come and go, but they are very modest. Additionally, Lauren’s job is often the same, but not always, and anyway, her job is superfluous. As the author tells us, “If she keeps changing husbands every couple of days…she will never have to work: she could coast forever on the diligence of her past selves, constantly dodging to new worlds where she hasn’t used her sick leave yet.”
With all her experience with these husbands, she explains these “rules” of her situation: “All of her husbands are men that some version of herself might have chosen to marry, and who might have chosen to marry her. None of them are going to be radically dissimilar from the husbands who have already visited…He [will have] changed nothing fundamental about the flat. And he will be a plausible husband for her. He will not be an astronaut or the King of Ruritania or a man whose great dignity forbids him the use of ladders. He’ll just be some guy.”
My critique of the book is that all of these husbands coming and going get a bit old. But then, to the author’s credit, there are some complications to spice things up. There are three situations in which Lauren has great difficulty getting the current husband to climb back up the ladder. And please note that she takes extreme measures to finally get them to go. And beyond that, there is that one very interesting guy, Bohai…
Negative reviews online take another form. They are of the sort that a woman does not need a man to be complete thus the cycling through so many guys was distasteful to those readers. But I was willing to put that aside wanting to see if there was any sage advice about love and marriage by book’s end.
Without giving anything away, I think this is the takeaway – there very well might be something wrong with every last potential spouse, but there is still a possibility of marital success when we decide we will do what it takes to make the given relationship work, even if the guy is one who chews with his mouth open or saves his toenail clippings in a little jar…
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Click here to learn more about The Husbands on Amazon.
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