1     Do you remember your first kiss? If you’re like most people, you would describe it as a magical occasion. Were you so certain you loved that person that you wouldn’t listen to anyone who said that you didn’t know the true feeling of love? This is what happened to Edie, the main character and narrator of Alice Munro’s  “How I Met My Husband”. [."] After her first kiss, her eyes were so filled with love they didn’t see the pitfalls, twists, and turns ahead. The theme of the story is because love is blind, it can take you on a journey full of unexpected turns.

2    Like Edie, Alice Kelling, Chris Watter’s fiancee, doesn’t recognize that her love life is falling apart. Her characterization seems of a high society type because of her nice clothes- “a pair of brown of brown [Ouch] and white checked slacks and a yellow top” (775). However, Alice is also described as being “Nothing in the least pretty or even young-looking about her”(775). Blinded by her feelings for Chris, Alice is quick to judge before she knows all the facts. For instance when she gets upset at Edie for being intimate with Chris Watters. [Frag -1] (Edie of course doesn’t realize what being intimate includes.) “Girls like you are just nothing, they’re just public conveniences, just filthy little rags” (779). To any objective observer, the lack of love would be clear when after a night out, “ Chris got out of the car on one side and she got on the other and they walked off separately…” (777). Obviously though, Alice’s judgement was also clouded over with love’s blindness.  Even though Edie and Alice were two very different people, they both succumbed to love’s blindness.

3     Since the story is a recollection of Edie’s life, it only makes sense that she is telling the story from her point-of view as a major character.  The audience learns of the narrator’s identity in the following conversation: “Would you Edie?, Heather said. I said I didn’t know” (770). [They don't know this from the title?] Because Edie is telling the story, the audience is able to gather important subjective emotions and thoughts such as how she felt when she received her first kiss “…those little kisses, so soft…”(778) and when the letter from Chris Watters didn’t come. “I kept on going to get the mail, but my heart was heavy now like a lump of lead” (781). Therefore, the audience is able to gain a better understanding of the complexities of love through Edie’s eyes.  [Relationship to thesis?]

4      Since the audience feels as if they are Edie, the sequential events in the plot make the story enjoyable to read.  If the author started with the ending first, as the author did in “A Rose for Emily”, the whole climax, which is when Edie ends up marrying the mailman would be ruined. [Very nice point] In “A Rose For Emily” the author started with the ending first so that the audience would feel sad, but in “How I met my Husband”, the author follows a sequential plot [as] to trick the audience into thinking Chris Watters is the husband reflected in the title. The kissing scene leads the reader to assume Chris is the husband of the title. When Chris tells her his secret that he’s leaving the area without telling his fiancee, Edie believes that she means more to him than she does. Edie is blinded by love. She thinks that because Chris kissed her and then told her his secret, he loves her. Edie soon realizes that he doesn’t really love her because he never writes as he said he would. Because she is still suffering over the heartbreak of Chris, Edie is then blind to the love the mailman has for her until she receives a surprising phone call. “He asked if I would like to go to Goderich, where some well-known movie was on…I said yes and I went out with him for two years and he asked me to marry him” (781). [In respect to plot-- if the title of the story is "How I Met my Husband," why is so much of the story about something else?]

5      Woman blindly in love is a common theme. Just as Granny was jilted when George stood her up at the altar in Porter’s “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”, Edie was also jilted when Watter’s letter doesn’t come in the mail. Unlike Granny though, something good does come of Edie’s misfortune. She makes a good friend of the mailman, who soon becomes her husband. Each of the women mentioned, Edie, Alice, and Granny, were blind to love’s pitfalls and unexpected turns. Fortunately for Edie, something good did come of her blindness of love but unfortunately, there are still many others out there following love’s blind[ness] journey.

     Although I wish that the writer had looked a little more closely at the question of plot, this is a very good essay.

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