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.