"Comfortably Ever After": Romance and Reality in Munro's "How I Met My Husband"

When students first read Alice Munro's often-anthologized story How Met My Husband, they are usually surprised by the ending. Most of the story focuses on seems a blossoming romance between the naive central character, Edie, and the charming Chris Watters, the chief obstacle seemingly being Alice Kelling, Chris's fiancee who desperately chases him around the country waiting for him her. Moreover, through almost the entire story, Chris is the only unmarried male over the age of nine. Given the story's title, readers naturally expect that Edie and Chris will marry. But instead, Edie ends up marrying a man named Carmichael, who isn't even mentioned until the last four out of the story's 198 paragraphs. The surprise isn't limited who the husband turns out be: it also involves the message of the story as a whole. Much of the story relies on stereotypical characters and situations which characterize ... 'romance fiction' (Louise K. MacKendrick, Some Other Reality: Alice Munro's I've Been Meaning Tell You. [Toronto: ECW, 1993]: 46), thus encouraging readers hope Edie will overcome all obstacles, Chris, and live happily ever after. But instead, the man she actually does is Chris's opposite in every way imaginable--and the ending suggests that after many years of marriage, Edie is perfectly content. Thus, after the story lures us as readers into accepting the ideals of romantic fiction, the ending encourages us question those ideals. In that sense, the story exemplifies a prominent trend in much of Munro's fiction. As Coral Howells has noted, Munro's stories often involve ironic revision of popular romance plots (Alice Munro [Manchester, England: Manchester UP, 1998]: 60, and Munro's protagonists, almost always female, must resist women's disposition toward shaping their lives as romantic (78). In choosing between pursuing Chris and accepting Carmichael, Edie faces a contrast between romantic fantasy and mundane but secure reality. At first glance, the contrast seems entirely favor Chris, and romantic fantasy. Chris is unforgettable: although Edie was alone with him only three times in her life, as the story's narrator she describes each of these occasions in exquisite detail, capped with a romantic encounter featuring kisses so lovely that the now-married Edie states, I can't ever let myself think them (Alice Munro, How Met My Husband, Something I've Been Meaning Tell You [Toronto: McGraw-Hill Ryerson, 1974]: 60)--presumably because in her ordinary married life, she might resent the absence of [her] kind of women have pass up and never know about (65). Carmichael, in contrast, is completely forgettable: Edie says that on their first date he took her to Goderich where some well-known movie was on, forget now what (65-66). And unlike the loving detail she pours into describing her occasions alone with Chris, Edie telescopes her years of courtship with Carmichael into a single sentence: after he asks her out on that first date, I said yes, and went out with him for two years and he asked me him, and we were engaged a year more while got my things together, and then we did marry (66). It's hard imagine a courtship described more prosaically, less romantically. Finally, in perhaps the most telling point Carmichael's lack of romantic appeal, Edie as narrator never even gives him a first name. …

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