Marriage
Marriage, almost automatically, is the central theme in the poem. The narrator imagines different paths married life could go for him and the implications they would have for his circumstances and future. He expresses disdain for every step of a conventional married life (dating, falling in love, wedding, honeymoon, childless period, and life as young parents) and takes great pleasure in imagining how he would disrupt the quiet and peaceful small town community as well as every tradition.
Nevertheless, for the narrator marriage is the key to not only a socially accepted life (which he appears to crave) but also the antidote to loneliness. This implies that marriage as an institution is not solely a social necessity, but something the narrator genuinely wants. The fact that he is never speaking about a real woman and instead focuses on imagined stereotypes portrays this need even more, as the craving for a marriage, not the love to a woman is central here.
The Right Woman
The three women appearing in the poem are constructed in the narrator’s mind and are more stereotypical representations of the living situations that the narrator is thinking about than real characters. At first, the narrator details a small town family life and, accordingly, the woman he imagines to share it with is a family-oriented, devoted housewife from a loving family herself. In stanza seven, the narrator briefly considers two contrasting lives in New York City, one as an upper class citizen with the matching educated beauty and one poor life with an ugly, nagging wife. The fact that the narrator thinks that the living situation has to fit the wife and vice versa is telling and emphasizes that he isn’t seeing marriage as a union between two people in love but as a social construct.
In the last stanza of the poem however, the narrator admits that ultimately the woman he would marry has to be a fit for him and not the life he has or wants to have. Therefore, even though he portrays a mostly sarcastic view towards conventional relationships and never once talks about his feelings for the women he imagines being married to, at his core the narrator appears to believe in one right woman existing for him.
Traditions
In the first seven stanzas, the narrator details the course of a conventional small town marriage, which is comprised of well-known traditions (such as meeting the parents for the first time for tea in a stiff and uncomfortable atmosphere). While the narrator makes a point of ridiculing and openly defy most of these traditions (such as taking his girlfriend to a cemetery instead of the cinema for their date) he cannot separate marriage from them. For the narrator, marriage is a social construct, not something done out of love. While he imagines mocking and ruining most of the traditions, he is still working within their frame of reference and not once establishes that marriage could exist entirely without conventions.
