He waited outside the fitting room without complaint.
This was, in Ingrid’s experience, rarer than it should have been. Previous partners had lasted approximately twelve minutes before starting to check their phones with increasing visibility, before making comments about time, before suggesting she just get the first thing. As if the exercise were a chore being performed on them.
Lars sat on the small bench outside the curtain and scrolled through his phone, genuinely unbothered.
When she came out in the third option, he looked up and actually looked at her. Not the glazed affirmative nod. Actually looked.
“That one,” he said.
“You said that about the last one.”
“That one was also good.” He paused. “But this one is better because you stood differently when you came out. More —” He made a vague gesture.
“More what?”
“Like yourself.”
She looked at her reflection. He was right. She couldn’t have articulated it either, but she stood differently in this one.
She bought it.
On the walk back to the car, she thought about how rare it was to be actually seen — not observed, not monitored, but seen with the specific attention that notices the things even you don’t notice about yourself.
“You’re good at that,” she said.
“Waiting?”
“Seeing.”
He looked at her sideways. “Only for things I’m interested in.”
They walked the rest of the way in the easy silence of people who have said the right things and don’t need to fill the space after.
✦ Today’s Reflection
When has your partner seen something in you that you hadn’t seen yourself — a quality, a truth, a version of you that needed naming?
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Sonia M. Rompoti, MSc, Bsc 
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