Holly Gramazio Is Here to Solve Your Dating Burnout
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In the opening pages of Holly Gramazio’s time-bending debut novel, The Husbands, 30-something Lauren returns to her London flat late at night to find her husband waiting at the door. There’s just one problem: When Lauren left the house, she was single.
Quick texts to friends, camera-roll photos, and a glance at the flat’s improved decor confirm what Lauren can’t fathom: She and this man have been together for years. But when he heads into the attic to change a light bulb, he abruptly disappears; in his place, another man descends, and a new, slightly altered life forms around Lauren in the blink of an eye. “The situation, however new to her, is clear,” Gramazio writes. “She has been provided with a husband, and each time that husband goes into the attic, he is replaced with a different husband.”
So begins Lauren’s kaleidoscopic and often hilarious journey through hundreds of husbands: some of them appealing, some of them instantly dismissed (farewell, husband with the barefoot toe shoes), all of them men that some version of her could plausibly love. At first, she wonders which husband she can live with for now, as she seeks a suitable plus-one for an upcoming wedding; then, which husband she can live with forever; and ultimately, which version of her life and herself she can live with. Through this warm, wise, and bittersweet story, Gramazio delivers a moving meditation on the paradox of choice in modern dating (and modern life): We have more choices than ever, but as a result, we struggle to make the right choice, or even to choose at all. For Gramazio, who works as a game designer as well as a writer, the gamification of romance in the age of online dating is all too apparent. Speaking with Esquire, she describes online dating as “a hobby of dutiful swiping.” She understands Lauren’s dating burnout all too well, telling Esquire, “That level of exhaustion about the process of trying to find someone to share your life with—it’s not fun.”
But there’s hope for the lovelorn yet—and according to Gramazio, it might involve dressing up in a cockroach costume. The author spoke with Esquire by Zoom from her home in London. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ESQUIRE: Where did The Husbands begin for you?
HOLLY GRAMAZIO: Six or seven years ago, I started trying to design a little video game about parachuting between relationships, finding yourself in the middle of them, and deciding where to stop. I only spent a couple of days on it; it was a personal project that didn’t go anywhere. A few years later, I came back to it when I hatched the idea of the attic as a delivery mechanism for the relationships and life situations I wanted to explore. But ultimately, it felt more natural to do that in a pure narrative form than in a video game. I’ve always assumed that I would eventually write a novel. I thought, Maybe now is the time.
Did that video game become the Husbands Generator?
The Husbands Generator came later on when I was trying to come up with husbands. There are so many men in the book—sometimes I would feel a bit stuck coming up with them. I didn’t want to end up returning automatically to the same kinds of characters that I’d already created, so I made the Husbands Generator to spark different ideas. I listed 800 names and 500 hobbies, as well as hundreds of jobs, pets, family members, and weird habits. The generator randomly combines them—press a button and you’ll get a new person. Usually I’d go, “That doesn’t feel like a real person. That’s just some random words.” But occasionally, one of them would spark something. I’d think, “That could be someone. That’s a person who might exist.” Even the process of making it was incredibly useful. I looked through lists of hobbies and statistics on what jobs tend to get the most approving swipes on Tinder. It helped me think about the range of people who exist in the world and which of them Lauren might plausibly be in a relationship with.
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What did you learn about which jobs get the most approving swipes on Tinder?
Student does pretty well for both men and women, which is an interesting one. For men swiping on women, the list is: interior designer, PR and communications, teacher, pharmacist, social media manager, and model down at number ten, just ahead of dental hygienist and flight attendant. For women swiping on men, the highest ranking job is pilot, followed by founder and firefighter. Then you get teacher at six and model at eight—model ranks higher as a job for men than it does for women. Doctor is down there at four, but lawyers rank at eleven, beneath paramedics and college students. I was surprised by all of this.
It’s interesting to hear you talk about how this tool enhanced your creativity, right at a moment when writers and other creatives are rightfully wary of how technologies like AI might intrude on their projects and their livelihoods. What’s your outlook on the relationship between technology and art?
Technology can be a useful tool for the process of making art. There’s plenty of technology that we’re very used to using in this way—so used to it that we don’t really think of it as technology. People write in a fundamentally different way when they have to handwrite everything in a book; they’re disinclined to write out a whole page again whenever they want to change anything, so they don’t make those changes. As opposed to working in a word processor on a computer, where you can very easily change things back and forth as long as you want. Technology is a tool to help you make a thing. I know a lot of people who’ve been working with technological tools to do generative writing for quite a long time—long before the current large language models popped up into the public imagination. Where people get rightfully anxious is when it’s used not as a tool but as a replacement. That obviously makes people worried about their jobs and their capacity to make a living. When the craft and the process of making something gets abandoned in favor of just typing—that’s when I, personally, get nervous.
I want to think that it’s a bit like the Husbands Generator. One of the things I value about art is the intentionality of it and the fact that someone is using it to communicate a thing that they have thought or noticed or want to say. There’s a lot you can do with various technologies to enhance your ability to do that. But when it instead becomes a matter of “I want to create something with these vibes,” and then you use technology to create an extruded product, what you end up getting as a reader is rather disappointing. Why should I spend my time reading this if you can’t be bothered to spend your time writing it?
You created hundreds of male characters for this novel. After spending so much time thinking about men—their traits, their foibles, their love of Mindhunter—have you arrived at any new understanding of modern men?
Most of the friends I’ve talked with about dating and dating apps are women. I have some friends who are men and nonbinary with whom I’ve talked about this, but mostly the perspective I get on online dating is a woman’s perspective. Writing The Husbands made me think about all the ways that online dating is just no fun at all for anyone. It’s no fun for women, it’s no fun for men—nobody is having a good time. At this point, it’s become a hobby of dutiful swiping, messaging, and trying to figure out if you can meet up with someone.
The way it just generally sucks is something I hadn’t thought about all that much until I started writing The Husbands, which got me thinking about this concept of finding yourself in the middle of a relationship without having to go through all the initial struggles. A couple of my readers have told me that the novel is quite kind about men—it mostly likes most of its men. I think that’s true, and part of that draws from my own experience. I’ve had very good luck in my relationships. They haven’t all worked out, but they’ve always been with fundamentally nice people who were trying their best, and we just ended up wanting different things.
I’m aware that relationships don’t always go this way. I did want the book to acknowledge that not everyone is always putting their best foot forward in relationships, especially ones they’ve been in for a long time. There are certainly times when Lauren behaves appallingly, too, with the excuse that she’ll soon be in a different universe and won’t have to feel bad about any of it. So much of a relationship isn’t in either individual person but in the ways that your different habits, compatibilities, and desires happen to bump up against each other in ways that encourage you to be your best self—or prompt a worse version of who you could be. Ultimately, I didn’t want the book to be a tour around different ways that men are bad.
You say that Lauren sometimes behaves appallingly. It’s interesting to see how her predicament allows her to take the easy way out. For example, when she has a husband who’s a messy eater, she remarks that she never has to confront him about it; you write, “She can send him away without ever having an awkward conversation.” Does modern dating insulate us from discomfort?
It perhaps insulates us from that very specific type of discomfort and instead replaces it with a whole different type of discomfort—of making your profiles and doing your chores, going through messages and sending a bunch of likes. It also encourages snap judgment. I met my husband at a games conference. When he moved to London a few months later, we hung out and eventually got together. After we’d been dating for a little while, he suddenly said, “I forgot to delete my profile.” I made him show it to me before he deleted it. Looking at it, there’s just no way I would have sent him a message. He mostly talked about work; it was very cheery and exclamation mark forward. When I was in my online dating stage, I was very much a cynical jokes girl. Show me a man who hated the world a little bit and we would get on. It was quite strange to realize that I would never have messaged him. It’s interesting to consider the ways we think we need to present ourselves to make the apps work for us. Perhaps those aren’t the ways that we really are in life.
One of our readers submitted this question for you: How did you find your agent?
Five or six years ago, Penguin got in touch with me and my colleague because they wanted to make a book version of a card game that we had designed, where you make a work of art playing with other people. A friend of ours introduced us to her agent, Veronique Baxter, so that she could talk us through the process and help us understand what this meant. She offered to represent us. We signed up with her, but the card game didn’t come to fruition. Years later, I’d written this novel and very nervously sent an email going, “Hey, I don't know if you remember me, but technically, we have a contractual relationship. I’ve written a novel—would you like to read it?” Thankfully, she read my first three chapters and wanted to move forward. I didn’t have to go through the very intensive querying process that I know a lot of writers experience.
One of the things that most impressed me about the novel is how, despite the Groundhog Day nature of the plot repeating itself, it’s packed with exciting twists that raise the stakes and propel the story forward. How did you keep the book exciting and varied when the conceit is inherently repetitive?
I wrote it in a very haphazard way. I wrote whatever scenes or characters or possible events struck me as things that could be interesting or funny. I ended up with this huge pile of disconnected scenes and husbands that were not in any order at all. I asked myself: What else could happen? How might I test the rules? What possible twists are there? That approach probably comes from my background in game design. Eventually, I worked on putting it all in an order that made emotional sense for Lauren’s journey.
Another thing that keeps the book exciting is how even though the predicament is always the same, Lauren’s feelings about it are ever-changing. It brings to mind the roller coaster that single people often experience; either you’re conquering the apps or you’re deleting the apps. Do you see parallels between Lauren’s predicament and the boom and bust cycle of modern dating?
Absolutely. I have friends who have just handed me their apps and said, “Can you swipe for me for a few minutes?” They feel like they have to do their evening shift on the apps, but they’re so exhausted by the endless process of looking at a person and trying to figure out whether they might get on or not. That level of exhaustion about the process of trying to find someone to share your life with—it’s not fun. It’s not romantic.
One of my favorite themes in the book was the paradox of choice. The impossibility of it, even—you write about Lauren “knowing there are hundreds of men out there who would date her, even marry her, but not knowing how to get to them.” How were you thinking about the idea of choice as you wrote this book?
I myself really struggle with making my mind up about a lot of different things. Not relationships—I’m very much a serial monogamist. I’ve rarely been single for more than a couple of months; I get emotionally invested in relationships quite quickly. But things like work, for example—honestly, even trying to be a game designer and a curator and a writer at the same time, that’s a bit of a mess. When I travel alone to an unfamiliar city for work, I’ll try to find somewhere for lunch and then find myself grumpy and hungry at 2:30 P.M. because I haven’t found something where I think, “Yes, this is perfect.”
That’s so emblematic of modern life. When we have too many choices, we don’t make one.
When you look at 400 jars of jam in the supermarket, how are you meant to know? There’s obviously not one correct jar of jam there. And because it’s only a jar of jam, it’s relatively easy to say, “It doesn’t really matter. I’ll just take this apricot jam that’s on sale.” But for anything where there’s a little bit of emotional importance to it, it’s difficult not to feel like there’s a correct choice, and we just have to keep thinking until we find out what it is. But there isn’t a correct choice—there are a bunch of choices. Some of them are good and some of them are bad. You just have to make one.
If you could be the president of modern dating for a day, what would you change?
I would bring back the model of old OkCupid, where you could answer hundreds of questions about yourself and get these weird percentage matches with people. Everyone’s profile had full paragraphs. That was broadly a more fun time for online dating and a more enjoyable process. It wasn’t necessarily more effective, but it felt like less of a slog for people who like answering a bunch of questions and reading. I’m sure there are plenty of people it doesn’t suit, but it was nice to have a bunch of questions where you could see how other people felt about things that are really important to you. It’s a shame that the way dating apps work now has become … well, work.
What would you say to people like Lauren, who feel stuck in their dating lives and don’t know where to turn?
Figure out a way to make it less torturous for you. For me, I’m very driven by ticking stuff off a list. In my online dating days, I said to myself, “I will send a message to someone new every day for a fortnight, and I will try to meet up with someone once a week for a month, and I’ll see how I feel after that.” Even if it went terribly, I still did the thing that I was trying to do. I also really like an excuse to go to an art gallery, a free outdoor performance, or whatever it might be. So I would try to schedule dates with people at events where even if we didn’t get on, I’d have done this thing that I wouldn’t have done otherwise. I’d get to the end of it and think, Obviously that person hated me, but at least I got to go to the science museum where we dressed up as cockroaches and learned about how cockroaches are born.
Is that an actual date you went on?
Yeah. It was a lovely time. No spark, but a lovely chat, and I learned a lot about cockroaches. Anyway, you don’t have to date exactly how the apps say you should. If you can, find whatever trick works to get you to do other things that you like. Maybe it will lead you to someone else who likes those things, too.
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