How I Met My Husband

While the title “How I Met My Husband” sets up the expectation that the heroine’s courtship with her future-husband should occupy the bulk of the narrative, Munro’s story treats Edie’s actual spouse as an addendum. Instead, the main plot centers on Edie’s encounter with Chris Watters, a wayward pilot who is in her life for a brief yet significant spell of time. Munro’s first-person narrative ensures that both the pilot and the mailman remain two-dimensional characters, as it concentrates on Edie’s experiences of the men rather than theirs of her. The woman is thus the subject, rather than the object of the love story. Additionally, the more mature narrator’s commentary from a point in the future concentrates on Edie’s young, fifteen-year-old self, as she offers observations such as how flustered she is when Chris tells her she is beautiful and she “wasn’t old enough to” understand his jokes or flirtations or to do anything but wish he would go away” (60). The story of how Edie meets her husband is also the story of Edie’s loss of innocence through her first real encounter with the romantic world of adults.

Munro sows the seeds of romance when she shows the elemental opposition between Chris and Edie. Chris, the restless, runaway pilot, is of the air, whereas Edie, a farm girl, is earthbound and practical. Chris invests Edie’s mundane routine with elements of airy unpredictability, as the site of their romance, the fairground tent, is a temporary locale, emphasizing Chris’s transience and foreshadowing his departure, which is as sudden as his arrival. Edie navigates her days thereafter in pursuit of his letter, a slip of paper, which will give more substance to their romance. Still, Munro avoids the cliché of an innocent, virginal girl being sexually awakened by an older man, as she shows how Chris’s daring corresponds with the sexually aware parts of Edie. Even before Chris enters the scene, she secretly admires herself in Mrs. Peebles’s evening finery and longs for someone to “kiss and rub up against” her (67). Edie play-acts as an adult and longs for adult experiences, yet when she visits Chris alone in his tent, Edie desires to return to the world of imagination. Edie’s pleasure over Chris’s attention remains linked to her longing for a sense of her own adulthood through sexual experience, rather than true emotional attachment to the pilot. Afterwards, when Edie is confronted with her own ignorance about degrees of physical intimacy, she again longs for Chris’s attention—this time in the form of a letter—to validate her as an adult.  

While Edie expects a fate-changing letter to arrive from Chris at any moment, her change in fate is linked to her smiling visits to the mailbox in another way: They result in Carmichael’s taking notice of her. The fact that Carmichael is one of many, both in his large family and with his trademark lip, indicates that he a more pedestrian type of lover than Chris. In further contrast to the mercurial Chris, Carmichael is reliable and consistent, appearing to Edie at the same time every day. The comic irony of the story arises when Carmichael reads a different intention into Edie’s mailbox visits than the one she keeps to herself. At the end, Edie conceals Carmichael’s misunderstanding out of kindness, and to protect her right to a story that is distinct from her duty towards others. Additionally, Edie allows Carmichael to enjoy his belief in her early attraction to him, just as she once enjoyed the illusion that Chris would write to her as he promised.

Edie is also at the center of confrontation between the women of the community who come from different classes and backgrounds of experience. Having lived in the country all her life, Edie has an idea of what the established social hierarchy should be, even as she bears witness to how it is changing. She is, for example, able to laugh with her family about how Mrs. Peebles feels overtired, despite the Peebles’ smaller family and modern conveniences. Though Edie covets the wealth and comfort of her employers, she also feels superior and more knowledgeable than the Peebles, who are countryside newcomers, in being able to judge Loretta Bird as ill-bred and interfering rather than as a simple woman who matches the landscape. Where the Peebles seek a kind of pastoral ideal, Edie is more acquainted with the realities of rural life, despite her lack of formal education or worldliness.

Later, Edie’s sexual inexperience causes her to become the subject of misunderstanding when she judges kissing as synonymous with being intimate, whereas the other women use it as a euphemism for sex. At the time of the misunderstanding, Edie is assumed to either be an ignorant country girl by Loretta’s standards, or promiscuous by Alice Kelling’s. Ultimately, her boss, Mrs. Peebles, judges her to be innocent and ignorant, although Edie’s seeking out Chris disturbs Mrs. Peebles and breaks down her trust in Edie. In showing Edie to be a multi-faceted character, who displays sexual desire, romanticism, and respect for propriety simultaneously, Munro destroys the patriarchal expectation that women should conform to stereotypes. Alice and Loretta are quick to weaponize sexual moralism against Edie, but Edie’s elusiveness means that she demands to be understood on her own terms.

Edie further resists stereotype when she finally realizes that Chris’s letter will never arrive. Edie imagines that “there were women all though life waiting, and women busy and not waiting” (76). Edie is certain that she belongs to the latter category, and therefore is more active and self-reliant than women who passively depend on men. Although Edie does fulfil societal expectations by getting married, by telling her story she shows that her fate arose from her decision to move on and take ownership of her actions, rather than her patience.