I’m absolutely certain that I’m now the most boring and ordinary that I’ve ever been. I’m very relaxed and surprisingly well mannered. I go to bed early, I avoid red meat and gluten, I get excited about trips to Costco. My slide to all this mundanity started in January 2019, when I tried to have a one-night stand with my high school boyfriend and accidentally married him instead.
I’ve been aware of Katherine Ryan for several years now (particularly from her appearances on British talk and game shows), and having always enjoyed her storytelling, I thought that How to Accidentally Settle Down would be a short and sweet palate cleanser between more serious fare. And it is that: not quite 50 pages, Ryan briefly summarises her romantic life — from first love, Bobby, to more adult relationships (including a long stretch with a man she calls “Then Boyfriend” [TB]; the father of her first child, Violet), and finally a reconnection with Bobby twenty years later — and while Ryan describes everything with a sardonic, comedic touch, the stories tend to somehow have both too much and not enough detail. Ultimately: I don’t know if this needed to be written, but it was an entertaining enough reading experience; still interested in reading Ryan’s longer work. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
After my daughter, Violet, was born and her arrival didn’t miraculously transform a grown man, I joked that we’d wanted a “save the relationship” baby, but we’d ended up with a regular one instead. No one in my family or friendship group had ever been a massive fan of TB, but I stand by his good qualities now like I did then. He’s not a terrible person, just a bit of a dreamer, and we were wrong for each other. My daughter, I believe, just really wanted to be born. Souls can do that, you know. They — from, I dunno, space or wherever — can match you up with a random person, drag you from Canada to the UK, strike you down with lupus, and keep you in an unsuitable relationship just so that they can exist on Earth. It’s all part of their journey, and I would never resent Violet for what she had to do to get here. If anything, I respect the hustle.
After describing her experiences with a few men that didn’t work out (nicknamed the Overlap, the Sketch Actor, the Comedy Producer [I basically have the same criteria as a giant panda for new relationships, in that if you put me in close enough proximity of a potential mate with adequate resources for long enough, we’ll eventually give breeding a go]), Ryan decided to concentrate on her career and single motherhood. I watched a video clip after reading this of Ryan being interviewed around the time the she had reconnected with Bobby and she describes how hard it was to introduce a man into the feminine, girl power space she and her daughter had forged for themselves, and I get that that must have been hard: you embrace this alternative model of, “We don’t need a man in the house to be a family,” and then you go and introduce a man into the house. Ryan doesn’t really go into this in the book (other than describing how ten-year-old Violet objected when the Danish commitment ceremony they participated in looked too much like a wedding), but as Katherine and Bobby have two more kids together now, it looks like a happy ending; and everyone deserves that.
The days are long, but the years are short, and it’s on our minds that every minute we spend caring for our family is an investment in the beautiful future we are hopeful for, when all the kids are old enough to be our friends. Having a family with my high school boyfriend, just as my hormonal teenage brain predicted, is the type of basic shit that I’ve come to live for.
