The Husbands

“The rules of this situation are becoming clearer to her. 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.”

Lauren decides that the husbands are not arbitrary: At some moment in each new life’s unremembered past, she has chosen to marry this man. In this way, she is convinced that there must be some aspect of the men that initially attracted them to her. However, she frequently finds herself at a loss for what that factor or characteristic might beowe.

“This is not acceptable. Toby and Maryam are her perfect match, her proof that two imperfect people can make something work, something straightforward and good […] Just two people who are happy with each other, two people who are careful and fond, Maryam’s distraction against Toby’s calm and low-key attentiveness.”

Lauren is angered when, during one of her husband switches, Toby and Maryam have an open marriage. Lauren has idolized the couple as the model of the perfect marriage and what she seeks to emulate in her own. That they agree to engage in sex with people outside of the marriage suggests to Lauren that their marriage is in some way flawed. She refuses, however, to let go of the notion that a perfect marriage exists.

“She’ll rewrite the whole thing soon, dodge repercussions, summon a new husband and with him a new world. She will ensure that Maryam remains devoted to Toby, and the pair of them will continue to provide their neat model of two people who can be happy.

She’s been too vague in her search, too unclear about what she wants from a husband. It’s time to focus. No swingers. No amdram enthusiasts. No open-mouth chewers. Just a nice man to keep for a week and take to a wedding. Not a perfect husband; just a perfect plus-one. She can worry about everything else later.”

When a problem arises in a relationship, Lauren’s coping mechanism is to avoid it rather than confront it until she is able to “send the husband back” via the attic. This strategy eventually proves unsustainable.

“What a marriage they must have, that she tells him about her incredibly mundane video calls. Is it a good sign, that they share so much? Or a bad sign, that they have so little of real interest to talk about?”

Lauren is constantly assessing each marriage, though she is unsure what her criteria should be. Later, when she puts these in writing with the help of Bohai, she will more quickly reject husbands as failing to meet her criteria. Here, however, Lauren is surprised by how mundane and ordinary married life can be.

“I don’t know, Rob’s not perfect, obviously. But it’s not like there’s some magical version of the world where you wouldn’t be a bit nervous right now, you know? You’re getting married. It’s a big deal. Being nervous doesn’t mean he’s the wrong guy. Being nervous is just a part of the process. The question is whether you want to do it anyway.”

The advice Lauren gives Elena as Elena prepares to marry is fraught with irony: Lauren cautions Elena against the very thing that she herself is immersed in—searching for a perfect husband via a “magical” device. It is not until the end of the novel that Lauren will truly embrace her own advice.

“She should be thinking about the wider implications of the husbands, their continued existence, their life in the world without her, but it’s too big, she can’t tease out what it means. Will she run out of husbands, if they’re being selected from a pool of men she might have married, rather than generated afresh? Is she going from most likely husband to least? The other way round?”

At times, Lauren swaps the husbands quickly, with little thought to the potential consequences. Here, though, is a rare moment when Lauren attempts to understand the process by which the attic provides the husbands and to take steps to act ethically and responsibly. The questions she poses here, however, are ones that she has no way of answering, however, and she will ultimately have to “choose” her husband based on relatively superficial qualities.

“She would rather have Carter than this mansion, she reminds herself, and it takes a moment but that still feels true. She finds the pictures of him with his beautiful girlfriend again.”

Of all the husbands she is given, Carter is the only one that Lauren truly feels a spark with. She is certain that he is the husband she is meant to be with, and she spends much of the novel lamenting the relationship they might have had together. His accidentally exiting Lauren’s life demonstrates that Lauren does not have as much control over the attic as she would like to believe.

“It’s only been three weeks since the first husband arrived, but the details of her old life are distant and airy, long weeks of nothing changing, days sliding into other days. What did she do? What was it like? She’d put things on the calendar and the things would come up and she’d do them […] She’d been happy enough, she thinks, carrying on with her life, habits and friendships and regular grocery orders to carry her from week to week with no real risk of anything going wrong.”

Lauren’s life has lost the focus and rhythm it once had. It is now entirely dictated by the swapping of one husband in hopes of a better one. Her focus is entirely on these relationships, with little consideration for other aspects of her life.

“The attic worked. She steps forward into the doorway that just moments ago had been blocked by drawers and waits for the next husband to descend. Everything is new again; everything is back to normal and everything is different.”

Lauren grows accustomed to magically “resetting” her life when things go wrong. By sending each imperfect husband into the attic, she avoids having to deal with problems or conflicts as they arise; instead, they magically disappear. This lifestyle where everything changes quickly has become her “new normal.”

“‘But I want to stop again,’ [Bohai] says. ‘Of course I do. I want a life where I know where I’m going to be in a week. I want to…pre-order something. I want to buy an overambitious spice mix and then never open it and throw it out three years later way past its best-before date.’

Yeah. ‘Me too,’ [Lauren] says, and she hadn’t been sure before but as she says it, it feels true. ‘I just have to find the right place to stop.’”

Both Bohai and Lauren are frustrated with the seemingly unending cycle of rejecting partners and receiving new ones. Without the permanence of their former lives, it is difficult to look ahead to the future. Both feel unstable but at the same time unwilling to settle for a partner who may not prove ideal.

“They criticize each other a lot, never seriously. It’s the relief, she thinks: not having to pretend. And it’s also just because they can; because there’s no way they’re going to fall out and never talk to each other again. This huge thing nobody else will ever know about or believe, shared only with each other.”

Bohai, because he is the only person who shares the experience of “magically” receiving new spouses as Lauren does, becomes a confidant whom Lauren trusts. Though she tried to share her experiences with Elena and Natalie, neither responded in a way that proved helpful. The friendship with Bohai, however, provides Lauren with the emotional release she needs.

“It’s not fair, she thinks, that she is always here waiting, that she is in Norwood Junction forever, that the husbands come and go and she remains. It’s not fair that her lives require their cooperation, that she has to cajole or trick or persuade when she wants them to leave, that she was always here in her old life and she’s always here now.”

Unlike Lauren, Bohai has the ability to leave his spouse. He is the one who transports to another place, while Lauren always remains in her flat. In this moment, she expresses frustration with this dynamic for the first time, perhaps regarding Bohai as having more agency in his circumstances than she does.

“But she’s trying this time, she’s really trying. She feels herself warming and shifting into this better life. Once or twice it’s too much, after a night of babysitting for example, and she calls in sick and naps all day or plays games on her phone […] But most of the time she does it, she lives up to the life another version of herself has made, the life of a person whose every decision is meticulously for the best.”

At times, Lauren’s life is “reset” to one that is rather different from her previous one, the one to which she is accustomed. These changes require emotional and mental energy that Lauren finds exhausting. This quote speaks to the notion of alternate lives, pointing out how different versions of Lauren may exist, depending on the choices she makes.

“You can’t send a husband back because he makes you too good. Especially not a husband who—she doesn’t love him, not yet, but she likes seeing him when she gets home, she likes lying in bed with him […] She even likes it when he shows her a paragraph from some informative article he’s reading. She wants to be better for him, for this life they’ve made.”

When Lauren learns that the husbands continue to exist in the world after she “sends them back” she becomes more sensitive to them, considering the repercussions of a “reset” from their perspective. This regard for one’s partner’s needs and feelings is central to marriage, and Lauren ultimately accepts this at the end of the novel.

“She thinks again about the time at the start of a relationship when people soften and change, the gift of temporary mutability. Elena, who scorned reality television until she watched twelve seasons of Survivor in the early days of dating Rob, Amos, who hated social media when they were together but started posting daily pictures with his girlfriend after.

She doesn’t always like the new versions of herself, but they help her understand the edges of who she might be.”

Lauren changes and grows as the novel unfolds. She comes to recognize that a successful marriage involves bending a bit to be the best person for the circumstances. In this way, she gives up on the belief that there is a single ideal mate she is meant to find.

“Lauren feels a little vehement, perhaps, a little excited, but it’s not the sort of excitement that comes with a crash. It’s the thrill of being able to do what she likes, of not having to figure out what a husband wants to do, what his expectations are, how they behave together, who sits where on the sofa, how he takes his tea and which mugs he likes, whether she should check before having her friends over, whose toothbrush is whose (a nightmare, every new husband).”

When Lauren is going through a divorce with Amos, she realizes that she is free to not be in a relationship for the first time in nearly a year. The reprieve this provides demonstrates how emotionally taxing the many relationships and her adjustment to them has been.

“She goes on quite a lot of dates. The husbands have taught her, she thinks, not to judge. Perhaps with her expansive view of the possibilities of life, she will make all sorts of discoveries about men, and herself, and the world?

In fact the husbands have, she soon discovers, taught her to judge extremely quickly, which she has to unlearn a little.”

Lauren is aware of the ways in which the multiple husbands have warped her sense of a “normal” relationship. Her willingness to unlearn some of the potentially harmful traits that she has acquired is a sign of the growth she undergoes in the late portions of the novel.

“Lauren likes the room as it is, her friendly plant in the middle, growing new leaves, occasionally dropping an old one, the coffee table jammed up next to the sofa so that it’s a fun little challenge to get into and out of. And most of all, she likes that she has no responsibility to make it normal and livable and shareable. It’s one of the things that makes her feel good about the dates not working out.”

During the period when Lauren is divorcing Amos and is free to date, she comes to enjoy her single life. It is a relief to live alone and not worry about adjusting her life for the comfort of someone else. In this way, Lauren’s return to single status is empowering.

“What if Carter really was the one? What if they were meant to be together? She can’t afford to go to America but she’ll be resetting the world soon so maybe she should just…go anyway? And then she’ll see him, and if they’re meant to be together, which they probably aren’t but isn’t it better to be sure, then at least she’ll know.”

Because of the attic and the ability to erase any mistakes that Lauren makes, seeking out Carter is less risky than it would be in ordinary circumstances. Lauren, though she has grown and changed because of the husbands, still clings to the possibility of renewing her relationship with Carter. Discovering whether this is possible seems to be inevitable.

“This rejection […] feels like the others, wrapped up into one: like Carter, like swiping and messaging and knowing there are hundreds of men out there who would date her, even marry her, but not knowing how to get them. Her safety net has always been: well, if she really wanted, she could just get a new husband. But not if Amos is in New Zealand. She can’t permit it. She is done with messaging people and awkward first dates and the supposed thrill of discovery; she’d done, she will find a spouse and she will stick with him or else she will settle into her own comfortable life with friends and she will not, she will never again, go on a date.”

Initially, Lauren is excited by the opportunity to date, certain that this will allow her the kind of agency to choose her mate that the attic has not satisfactorily provided. Having grown tired by the entire process, she resigns herself to stick with one husband for good, no matter who he is.

“When he leaves, she thinks, the memory of this day will be gone for everyone except her. She’ll never see the Phils do a Phil five again, Caleb won’t remember teaching her his newly invented kick, she won’t be able to message Elena and say That birthday cake you got me, that was great, where was that from. She’ll walk past the pub and think about the nice time she had, but whoever she’d with won’t remember it, even if they were with her.

June in a couple of weeks. Then she’ll have been doing this for a year, a whole year that nobody else will remember and share. She thinks about the blurry picture she took with Carter at Elena’s wedding, and it’s not even about wanting Carter back, not any more; it’s that she’d been so happy to start building a tiny shared history, and then she lost it.”

Lauren realizes that among many of the frustrating aspects of the changing of husbands is the way that it prevents time from moving forward. She is not able to truly develop meaningful relationships because of the way her life is always “reset” with each new husband. The realization of the myriad ways in which the attic impacts her life is instrumental in Lauren’s decision to destroy it.

“Time is moving on without her. There’s so little that’s the same between one life and another: having Toby and Maryam downstairs is one of the only things that’s made it home. They’re her proof that two imperfect people can like each other and be happy and even stay happy.”

Lauren has always placed Maryam and Toby’s relationship on a pedestal, assuming it to be perfect. Now that she knows it is not perfect but endures nonetheless, she continues to admire it but for a different reason.

“She’s had so many lives, and some of them were bad, but a lot of them were good, and maybe there isn’t a single best path forward that she has to find.”

The realization that Lauren is not meant to be with a single, ideal husband serves as the epiphany that she needs to stop the cycle of husbands. She decides that she can be happy in a multitude of ways, and whichever husband she winds up with, he will be one with whom she can build a future.