The Back Up (Husband) Plan
“If we r both single when we both r 50 we marry?”
It’s just after 9:00pm in the US, which means it’s just after 3:00am in Norway and my friend Ove (who you may recall from his appearance on My Single Male Friend Friday a few months ago) is just coming home from a night out. He’s been drinking, which means his English is a bit more… creative than usual, but he’s awfully endearing when he’s drinking and tonight is no exception.
“Sure,” I tell him. “But 40 would be better.”
He agrees, based on the logic that “we r still young and beautiful at 40.” (Whereas we’ll be “old and ugly at 50.”)
I’m tempted to remind him that he will be nearly-50 by the time I’m 40 (so I’ll probably have to trade him in for a younger and more “beautiful” model) but I resist the urge because if I am still single at 40, Ove would make for a good fall back husband. I’d get bilingual kids with EU passports and dual citizenship (or so I imagine—I should probably look into Norwegian immigration law before I go making any serious plans) and they’d have cool Scandinavian names like Leif and Lars and they could talk to my dad about Vikings.
But let’s talk about the notion of the fall back husband, shall we?
Ove is hardly my first fall back husband. (This, I’m sure, comes as little surprise to most of you.) I’ve made fall back plans with nearly every ex-boyfriend (because “eventually” always seem so much more doable than “right now”) and I know I’m not the only person who does this because they made an entire movie about it, starring Julia Roberts and whenever you’ve got a chick flick starring Julia Roberts, you know you’ve got a universal theme on your hands (prostitution, commitment phobia, blended families, spiritual enlightenment and whatever the hell Knotting Hill was supposed to be about).
(As a brief aside, I hated Knotting Hill almost as much as I hated Shakespeare in Love and I really don’t know why because you’d think both films would have been right up my alley. But getting back to the notion of the fall back husband…)
With someone like Ove, an agreement of this sort is amusing; sure it’s sweet but I know it’ll never happen so I don’t put any real stock in it. If I’m still single (and blogging about being single) at the age of 40, you can bet I’ll be on the first plane to Norway but not in order to marry my charming Scandinavian friend—simply in order to… you know… do that which we’ve never actually done.
Marriage is an entirely different prospect in which, as far as I can tell, one must surmount an entirely different set of obstacles (ie. I don’t speak Norwegian, Ove’s never sustained a serious long term relationship in his life and relationships born of nightclub hookups are usually destined for disaster).
When you make a fall back plan with someone you can actually picture yourself marrying, however, things get ugly. I know this because I made such an agreement several years back with a boy I met during my junior year abroad. We had been going back and forth for ages—he was never single when I was single, and vice verse— and it took me years to figure out that even when we did occasionally experience a brief period of overlapping singlehood, we were completely wrong for each other. (As in he was a manipulative *sshole whose only real talent was in making me cry.)
But he had a way with words and he talked his way around the phrase “I love you” so many times and in so many different ways that I thought he was just being poetic. (In truth, of course, he never actually loved me, and I never actually loved him but this didn’t stop us from having the “If in ten years we’re both still single…” conversation.)
Here’s the thing with the fall back plan: if you have to introduce a buffer zone of ten or twenty years into the relationship, you’ve got issues. Serious issues. There’s a difference between saying “Let’s wait until we graduate from college” and saying “You know, I think I like you but I’d like to sleep around—I mean shop around for a bit.”
The former says “I’m trying to be responsible about building a future with you,” whereas the latter says, “If I don’t find anyone better in ten years, then we’ll talk. Maybe…”
The anthropologist in me is curious to know if there are any exceptions out there—has the fall back husband actually worked for anyone?— because as far as I can tell, it’s one thing to joke about one’s marital prospects. It’s an entirely different matter to actually enter into such an agreement (we all know what happened to Julia Roberts).
Kat Echevarría Richter 
8 Responses to “The Back Up (Husband) Plan”
You forgot the ugly duckling/sibling rivelry double theme of America’s Sweethearts. Julia covered a lot of ground in that one. And wore a fat suit.
not sure I know fall back stories, but do know a few couples who met again in life, after the first marriages didn’t work out…and then they ended up together, does that count? I believe our neighbors fit the bill, you’ll have to ask them, for anthropological material of course, not ’cause we’re nosy.
Here is some food for thought Kat: In the musical Fiddler on the Roof,, the main character asks his wife, who he had an arranged marriage to, if she loved him. Her response was that after being with him, cleaning, cooking, having kids, and sharing her life with him, what else could it be but love? This gets to a larger point, which is that I believe that one of the most important things that must exist in the long term-relationship of any kind is that the two people involved “make it work.” Granted, there are some things that are either there or are not, and can not really be created; however, I believe that the line between an extremely intimate friendship and a relationship can be very small. There is one female friend who I am extremely close to, and be both care about each other a lot, and if for some reason we were in a situation where we hypothetically had to get married, we could probably make it work, and be happy, at least for a while.
To Carl’s point, some book of Michael’s that I picked up had this quote, (from a minister counseling premarital couples point of view) You think your love will keep your marriage alive, but really your marriage keeps your love alive. Wish I could remember where I read it. To your question, no, don’t know anyone for whom the fall back thing worked. Do know of one case where two couples switched partners. Both new couples are still married 25 years later.
Yo! What’s with the 40 “desperation” comment, yo? 🙂
I’ve had fallback husbands but they all got married.
A deeper issue, I feel, is this: Many couples feel–I would say at the 4 year mark?–that “it is time”. Do they love each other? Akin to Carl, sure they do…they’ve been together a long time! Why else would they be together? It must be love! Let’s get married.
To this I say Tread Lightly. I got engaged at 28, married at 29, and divorced at 30. Only to question myself for the next 10 years, “Did I really love him?”
Second time around, I got engaged at 40 and married at 41. And I discover that I couldn’t possibly have loved my first husband for what I feel for my beloved now.
Going back to the age issue. Ok, admittedly, in my 40’s, people are telling me I’m “well-preserved”. I guess the formaldehyde is working…
What a mess!! Not sure if it has worked for anyone but what I do know is that an ex-boyfriend is an ex for a reason why make a plan to meet again later!
I feel like getting married “just because” is a strange idea. (Strange in movies, stranger in real life). Why torture yourself if you don’t have to? 🙂 Jokes aside, I always tell people that I was married to Dale way before I had the piece of paper saying it was official. The ceremony was just a formalization of our current reality, and after the wedding was over, we picked up and continued on as we were.
It would seem that you will either have to get through a lot of divorces as well, or be polygamous, in order to keep true to all the deals you have struck.