56 pages • 1 hour read
Holly GramazioThe Husbands
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2024A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Illusion of Control
When Lauren understands that her attic will magically supply her with a new husband whenever she wants, she is relieved and excited about her ability to control the outcome. Since each man who appears is someone whom, at one point in her life, she must have chosen to marry, she believes that each must possess some quality that makes him well-suited to be a marital partner. Her task, then, is to root out and eliminate the poor choices in search of the best husband. Since she can reject husbands simply by sending them to retrieve an item from the attic, Lauren is initially able to avoid any unpleasantness. She never has to hurt a husband’s feelings or justify to him her reasons for rejecting him as a partner. If a problem arises in her life, she rarely confronts it head-on. Instead, she waits it out until she can exchange the husband, thus “resetting” her life. Lauren loves and quickly grows to rely on the control the attic gives her. She is certain that its magic allows her to dictate her own future, that by discerning the “correct” husband, she will be able to arrange for herself an ideal life.
This control, however, proves to largely be an illusion. Many aspects of Lauren’s life are at the mercy of the attic. She must adapt to unfamiliar circumstances—such as jobs in which she is not able to fulfill her duties—on a whim. In many instances, aspects of the lives of those close to her have changed drastically: In one case, her niece and nephew do not exist; in another instance, she is expecting a baby. These are significant, large-scale changes to the life that Lauren is accustomed to living and, as such, “choices” that the attic has made for her rather than her choosing them of her own free will. Ironically, the ability to reject husbands and thus “restart” her life anew proves maddening for Lauren, as she is unable to achieve contentment in any given life—the fear that a better, fuller life with a more compatible husband is within her reach prevents her from feeling happy in any of her lives. Throughout most of the novel, Lauren operates under the belief that once she finds the right husband, the rest of her life will fall into place automatically. In searching for this perfect husband, she relinquishes control over all other aspects of her life—her work, her friendships, even where she lives—believing that the only way to change these things is by changing husbands. By imagining that this one aspect of her life is the key to controlling everything else, she ironically cedes control of her life. When she destroys the attic, Lauren is finally taking the first necessary step toward building her own happiness by shifting her definition of control: Rather than choosing a ready-made, perfect life as if from a catalog, Lauren will accept the role of chance in her life and control what she can, making her own choices and building a relationship with her partner based on mutual accommodation and compromise.
The Myth of the Ideal Marriage
As Lauren learns that the attic will supply an endless succession of husbands, her goal becomes to reject the imperfect husbands in order to find the absolute best partner—the ideal husband to whom she is meant to be married forever.
In her search for the ideal, Lauren rejects many husbands based on habits she finds bothersome. These range from a husband who chews food with his mouth open to one who collects his toenail clippings. Sometimes it is a physical feature—such as baldness—that Lauren finds she cannot tolerate. At other times, the reasons for rejection are more serious, such as a husband who is addicted to illegal drugs or one who is having an affair. In all cases, however, Lauren operates under the assumption that she need not learn to cope with the husband’s particular flaw when another, better husband is likely available in her future. The promise of an ideal husband somewhere in her future makes her unwilling to tolerate any flaw, no matter how small. In several instances, Lauren decides to remain temporarily married to a man she is not attracted to because he has no habits or quirks that she finds intolerable. These instances are a brief respite from the work and stress that comes with getting to know a new husband.
Ultimately, however, Lauren understands that she cannot continue to reject the husbands into infinity. The ideal mate, it appears, likely does not exist. It is possible that Carter—with whom she experienced chemistry but who accidentally went into the attic on his own accord and was replaced—was the ideal husband, but she has lost her chance to find out. Since she barely knew him before he disappeared from her life, the possibility that he was her ideal match is just as theoretical as the possibility that some future husband will be that ideal. In reality, Lauren learns that marriage entails sticking with and committing to someone who is “close enough” to perfect, knowing that conflict, unpleasantness, and other stress will be unavoidable. She decides to stick with the husband who appears after the attic is destroyed regardless of who he is and before meeting him, learning to identify and thrive with the whole person rather than trying to avoid all flaws.
Technology’s Impact on Relationships
Lauren realizes very quickly in the novel that the internet and digital world provide a useful tool in her new life of constantly revolving husbands. She can discover her present husband’s identity and other basic information merely by researching him. This allows her to seamlessly pretend to “know” the husband, fitting into each of her new lives with relatively little difficulty. Similarly, her text messages, emails, and photos serve as a sort of history book that records her relationship from dating and courtship through marriage and into the present day. In this way, Lauren is also able to glean changes in the lives of the important people around her as well as trace changes in her job and other significant aspects of her life. Such information only confirms and validates Lauren’s strange circumstances; without it, Lauren would dwell in constant confusion. She relies on the digital repository to such an extent that her cellular phone becomes a kind of security blanket, linking her to her past life—because it physically existed then—but also showing her how to navigate each of her presents.
The utility of this tool is mixed, however, as Lauren quickly forms a habit of tracking past husbands upon their exit. She becomes immersed in comparing and contrasting their existing lives (and wives or girlfriends) to that which they held when married to her. In this way, Lauren grows self-conscious and swept up in trying to control the way her life looks to the outside world—occasionally choosing husbands to impress friends and family. The images she witnesses on social media, however, create the guise of a happy, fulfilling life—lives absent of conflict, stress, or other problems. In this way, Lauren often has a false view of the past husbands and, in turn, is not objectively able to gauge her own contentment. With so many portraits of relationships on display to her, she is at a loss for what true commitment and happiness should look like.
Lauren takes advantage of technology most by following Carter through each of her subsequent marriages. He, more than any other past husband, becomes an obsession for Lauren. His social media accounts repeatedly paint a picture of someone who is content and thriving without Lauren in his life. Despite this, Lauren is convinced that she can rewrite her fate by reuniting with Carter. Dwelling on the photos she finds online allows her to keep alive the hope that they will one day be reunited in real life; however, meeting him proves that this is not possible, thus forcing Lauren to move on to a permanent future.
