7 Signs You Are With the Right Person (That Nobody Talks About)

I never thought I would be the kind of person who looks forward to grocery shopping.

Genuinely, for most of my adult life, the grocery store was something I got through. A chore. Something that sat on the Sunday to-do list between laundry and calling my mother back. I would go in, get what I needed, come home, and feel absolutely nothing about the entire experience.

And then I started going with David.

Now it is somehow one of my favourite parts of the week.

1. We take longer than any two adults should reasonably take in a grocery store.
2. We debate things that do not matter.
3. We put things in the cart that were not on the list.
4. We have entire conversations in the cereal aisle that have nothing to do with cereal.
5. We come home having spent more than we planned and I am unreasonably happy about all of it.

Nothing about the grocery store changed. Everything about being with someone who know what the right love actually feels like and should be.

That is what this post is about.

There is a version of love that sells itself on the highlights. The holidays. The anniversaries. The moments worth photographing. And those things are wonderful. I am not here to argue against them.

But the thing that actually tells you that you are with the right person is not how they show up for the big moments. It is what happens to the small ones. The ordinary, unscripted, completely unremarkable moments that make up the vast majority of an actual life together.

When those moments start to feel like something, you have found something real. Here are seven of them.

1. Grocery Runs

I already told you about the cereal aisle. But there is something more specific I want to say about this one.

Grocery shopping with the right person is the most unexpectedly intimate experience. You are making a thousand small decisions together. You are seeing inside each other’s habits and preferences and the completely irrational things you refuse to compromise on.

David will not buy a different brand of coffee even if the one he likes is not on sale. I have accepted this about him. He thinks my insistence on buying flowers every single week without fail is unnecessary. I have not accepted his opinion on this and never will.

These tiny negotiations, repeated week after week, are actually how you build a life with someone. Not in the dramatic moments. In the cereal aisle.

2. Morning Routines

The morning is when people are most unedited.

Before the performance of the day begins, before anyone has had enough coffee to be fully diplomatic, there is this raw, quiet, slightly dishevelled version of a person that most people in the world never get to see. You are one of the very few people who gets to see your partner in that state. And they get to see you.

With the right person, the morning is not something to get through before the real day starts. It becomes its own small ritual that you actually look forward to. The specific way they make coffee. The conversation that goes nowhere because neither of you is fully awake yet. The comfortable silence that does not need to be filled.

I used to be a person who needed to be alone in the mornings. I needed quiet and space and at least forty five minutes before I was ready to interact with another human being. David walked into my life and somehow became the exception to that rule without either of us noticing it happen.

Now the mornings he travels for work are the ones that feel slightly off in a way I cannot fully explain.

The right person does not disrupt your peace. They become part of it.

3. Sitting in Traffic

There is no environment less romantic than a traffic jam.

You are hot, you are running late, the music choices are suddenly very important, and everyone around you is making decisions that make no logical sense. Traffic has ended more than one tense road trip conversation in my life. I have sat in silence next to people I was dating and felt the distance between us grow with every minute we did not move.

With David, traffic is just more time together.

We talk. We play music and argue about it in the best way. We people watch the cars around us and invent entire narratives about the strangers we can see. Sometimes we just sit quietly and I look out the window and feel completely at peace with the fact that we are going nowhere fast.

Pay attention to how you feel in the car with your person when things are not going smoothly. It tells you more about the relationship than any good day ever could.

4. Sunday Evenings

Sunday evenings used to give me a specific kind of anxiety.

If you know, you know. That creeping feeling that arrives around five in the afternoon when the weekend is almost over and the week is looming and somehow you have not done everything you meant to do and the day is slipping away and it all feels slightly melancholy for no dramatic reason.

I still feel that sometimes. But it hits differently now.

Because Sunday evenings with the right person become their own specific thing. A ritual without rules. Maybe it is cooking something that takes longer than a weeknight allows. Maybe it is a show you only watch together. Maybe it is the way the light comes through the window at that hour and you are both just existing in it without needing to make it anything more than what it is.

The Sunday evening feeling does not disappear when you are with the right person. But it becomes something you move through together. And there is a profound difference between facing the end of a weekend alone and facing it next to someone who is in it with you.

5. Getting Sick

Nobody looks good sick. Nobody is their best self sick. You are needy and unglamorous and deeply uninteresting company and you need things constantly and you cannot even pretend to be low maintenance about any of it.

The right person does not care.

The first time I was properly sick around David, not the polite kind of sick where you insist you are fine, but the genuinely miserable, cannot get off the couch, please bring me things kind of sick, I was embarrassed in a way I did not expect. I was not used to being seen like that. I was not used to needing that much from someone and having them give it without making me feel like a burden.

He made soup. He sat with me even when I was terrible company. He did not make me feel like I was inconveniencing him by being human.

I know it sounds like a small thing. It is not a small thing. It is one of the clearest ways the right person shows you who they are when there is absolutely nothing in it for them.

6. Doing Absolutely Nothing

This one is underrated and I will not let it go without being said.

There is a specific quality of doing nothing with the right person that is unlike any other experience. You are both just existing. Nobody is entertaining anyone. Nobody is performing. You might be in the same room doing completely different things or you might be doing the same nothing side by side. But there is a companionship to it that is deeply, quietly satisfying.

I have had relationships where silence felt like a problem to be solved. Where doing nothing together meant something was wrong, that we had run out of things to say, that the relationship was losing its spark. And I have been in enough of those to know that comfortable silence is not something you can manufacture.

It either exists or it does not.

With the right person it exists so naturally that you stop noticing it, the same way you stop noticing you are breathing. It is just always there. Underneath everything. Holding you both.

7. Coming Home

This is the one that gets me every time I think about it.

Not coming home to a place. Coming home to a person.

There is something that happens when you walk through the door after a long day and someone who genuinely loves you is on the other side of it. The day does not disappear. The hard parts are still hard. But something in your body releases in a way that nothing else quite produces. Like you have been slightly braced all day and you did not fully realise it until you were finally somewhere safe enough to stop.

I used to come home to an empty apartment and tell myself I liked it. The quiet. The space. The nobody needing anything from me. And I did like it, genuinely, for a season of my life. But what I have now is better in a way that is hard to articulate without sounding like a greeting card.

Coming home to David is my favourite moment of most days. Not because anything dramatic happens. He might be on a call. I might go straight to the kitchen. We might not even properly greet each other for another twenty minutes.

But he is there. And I am there. And something about that simple fact makes the whole day make sense in a way it did not before I walked through the door.

That is the right person.

Not the one who makes your life look better. The one who makes it feel better. In the grocery store and the traffic and the Sunday evenings and the quiet nothings that turn out, when you look back, to have been everything.

 Send this to the person who made the ordinary parts of your life your favourite parts. They should know what they did.

Patricia Monroe