The narrator and protagonist, Lauren immediately finds herself immersed in conflict in the novel’s opening pages. A friendly and upbeat single woman in her thirties living in London, Lauren’s life revolves around work, a handful of friends, and her sister and sister’s children.

Lauren describes her life as a single woman—prior to the attic’s dispensing of husbands—as a time of contentment. She never truly longed to be married and had no grand ambitions. She was happy to go about life from day to day. The attic, however, forces her to cope with life as a part of a couple. Once Lauren has mastered the attic’s rules of operation (though the mechanism by which it works is unknowable), she is eager to discover the husband who is her perfect match. This belief that there is a single, ideal partner out there somewhere for her is the novel’s central source of conflict and leads Lauren into a great deal of unhappiness and frustration. In comparison with an imaginary ideal, perfect husband, no actual partner is acceptable. In many instances, Lauren is highly focused on how her preferences and comfort are impacted by the husbands, giving little thought to how her actions impact them.