There was a couple we used to watch for. This was back at the small CPA firm, during my divorce and the raw period just after it. My desk sat by a big window that looked out onto a parking lot and a walkway, and we shared the building with a few restaurants, so there was always a little foot traffic drifting past around lunchtime. My work bestie sat near me, and between the two of us we didn’t miss much out that window.

And there was this older couple who would come by regularly, headed to lunch, well into their years. And every time, he’d be holding her hand on one side, and carrying her purse on the other. This grown man, presumably decades into a marriage, walking to lunch with his wife’s handbag in his hand like it was the most natural thing in the world, because to him it clearly was. There was no self-consciousness about it, no ego. It was just his wife’s hand in one of his and her purse in the other, the whole ordinary picture of a man who had her, in public, at lunch on a Tuesday.

We started looking out for them. My friend and I would catch sight of them and report back to each other. Did you see them today? There they are. It became a small thing we shared, a little ritual of watching for that couple and their purse, two women getting each other through our own hard seasons by keeping an eye out for proof that the good version existed. Because that’s what they were, proof.

I was coming out of a marriage that had been the opposite of that in every way. I knew, by then, exactly what men could be. I recognized the danger, the absence, and the cruelty dressed up as love. And there, out my office window, was the other kind, the kind I wasn’t sure I’d ever actually get for myself, strolling past at lunchtime carrying a purse. It steadied something in me just to see it. To know it was real. To know that somewhere, a man was walking his wife to lunch and holding the thing she handed him, and had been, probably, for forty years.

I’ve thought about that couple for a long time now. And when I ask myself what I want, at this point in my life, after everything, they’re the answer. It’s not the reaching across great distances for something that never quite arrives. I’ve had the dramatic kind. I’ve learned what it’s worth.

What I want now is smaller than that, and so much bigger. I want the man who would carry my purse at lunch. I want the regular lunch date, the standing one, the Tuesday kind. I want someone who has my back in the plain, daily, unglamorous ways, who shows up so consistently that it stops being remarkable and just becomes the texture of a life.

I want what my grandfathers gave my grandmothers. They gave the gift of showing up for their wives in the quiet ordinary ways that turn out to be everything. That’s the model. That’s what love looked like in the good version I got to witness growing up, and it’s what that old man at the window was still doing decades on. They are not performing love. They are just being there, reliably, in the small hours of an ordinary day.

I don’t need to be swept off my feet. I’ve been swept plenty, and swept isn’t the same as held. What I want is to be the woman whose partner is holding her purse in a parking lot at lunchtime, both of them older, both of them still walking side by side to nothing more exciting than a sandwich, because being together was always the point. I watched for that couple out a window during some of the more trying years of my life, and I never stopped believing the thing they proved. It exists. I saw it. He carried her purse. And that, after all of it, is what I want now.