This!

I was reading a Salon article about Miranda July and she said this:

I’m most interested in people close to me. I’m pretty scrupulous about not reading my husband’s email, but I always delight in getting a CC: with a long payoff and seeing how he engaged with someone else. … You’re seeing them in an unfamiliar way.

Have you ever run into your partner or your friend out in the world? It’s so thrilling! If you live together — it seems remarkable to say, I just saw you and you were walking down the street like a normal person!

I couldn’t agree more. I always loved, when I was in a relationship, to see my partner interact with people in an unfamiliar-to-me role. It could be seeing them at work, getting forwarded an email exchange they had with someone else, or even something like the time my half-Mexican then-husband and I were in his Texas border hometown and  went to a bakery in one of the entirely-Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. He was in search of a pastry from his childhood, and had the entire conversation in Spanish. I never heard him speak Spanish (which he only sort of speaks, though he understands) in normal life. It was deeply cool.

(He never did find the pastry. Had I been a better wife I’d have done some research and made them myself. Sorry, ex-husband.)