What it’s like to be married to my husband

He lives in a very specific bubble

My husband was in New York recently and kept me abreast of all the fun he was having while I was at home with the needy dog. On the last day of his whirlwind trip, he messaged me triumphantly. “People are so nice here! Someone stopped to compliment my shirt and the man at Sephora let me stay in the store even after they were closing.” I thought about this for a minute. Are New Yorkers renowned for their geniality and patience? Not to my knowledge. Instead, let me apply Occam’s razor - that the simplest explanation is usually the closest to the truth - to this scenario. Attractive people get treated better, therefore New Yorkers were nice to him because he’s handsome.

There’s an episode in the show 30 Rock called The Bubble, where Tina Fey’s character Liz Lemon dates an attractive doctor played by Jon Hamm. He’s completely oblivious to how nicely people treat him because he’s hot, and Liz attempts to show him what life is like outside the bubble. It ends in failure after he protests that he doesn’t like it outside the bubble because as he incorrectly puts it, “it’s very ironic.”

I joke that my husband lives in a bubble of sorts, a very nice one where people go out of their way to be kind to him, and where good things happen without him ever having to ask (though to my knowledge Calvin Klein has never asked him to be in an underwear commercial like Jon Hamm in the bubble). In New York this was because he’s good looking, but at home, it’s because he’s a bit famous. Not George Clooney level famous, not perhaps even Richard Madeley level famous, but recognisable to some and liked by many. In any bubble type situation he encounters, I am merely an extra, and it’s strange (and often quite funny) to observe. Here are some things I’ve seen during the course of our relationship:

He once accosted Angela Rippon on a busy street in Oxford while holding a banana just because he wanted to meet her. I wouldn’t dream of going up to somebody I didn’t know personally but she was charmed. I stood 10ft away awkwardly watching him wield the comic piece of fruit as they happily chatted away, the link made easily because he’s well known enough to do something like that and it not be creepy. People in the bubble can connect with others in the bubble like this (I don’t think he could try this with George Clooney, I suspect there are tiers inside the bubble).