I was just trying to get through the Aldi on a busy Saturday afternoon.

You know how it is. Midday on a weekend, every lane packed, carts bumping, people reaching across each other for the last thing on the shelf. It’s controlled chaos on a good day. I was minding my own business, working my way up and down the aisles, when I became an unwilling audience to something that stuck with me long after I loaded my car and drove home.

There was a woman. And there was her husband.

What I witnessed in the Aldi aisle

She was loud. Not accidentally loud. The kind of loud that fills a store aisle from end to end and makes strangers make eye contact with each other just to confirm they’re all hearing the same thing. Up and down every aisle, she was at him. “We’re not getting that.” “Why did you put that in the cart?” “Don’t take stuff out of the cart. I’m trying to get it organized.”

Every correction delivered at full volume. Every instruction sharpened into a command. The husband said very little. He just moved through the store quietly, absorbing it, the way someone does when they’ve learned that responding only makes it worse.

When we got to the checkout line, the single queue that feeds both the self-checkout lanes and the cashier, she wheeled on me. “Why are people in line all the way back here when the checkouts are up there?” I explained as pleasantly as I could that it’s one line feeding all the registers, that the store is usually this busy on a Saturday afternoon. She didn’t love the answer. She moved on. Back to her husband.

I felt genuinely bad for the man.

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Aldi | photo by EJ

Aldi | photo by EJ

The question that stayed with me after I left

Here’s what I kept thinking about on the drive home. There is no way she was like this when they were dating. Nobody leads with that. Nobody meets someone, falls in love, builds a life with them, and opens with the version of themselves that screams about cart organization in a grocery store. At some point, she was kind to him. At some point, he was the person she was most careful with.

What happens to that?

I think what happens is comfort, which sounds like a good thing and mostly is. But comfort has a shadow side. The people closest to us become the ones we stop performing for. We save our patience for strangers, our pleasantness for coworkers, our best behavior for anyone whose opinion of us still feels uncertain. And the person at home, the one who has chosen us every day, gets the version of us we’d never show anyone else.

We can do better than this

I want to believe that couple is the exception. That most people who have spent decades building a life together still find ways to be decent to each other in the produce section. I think most do.

But if you saw yourself a little bit in that story, not the screaming, maybe, but the sharpness, the impatience, the way you talk to the person you love when no one you’re trying to impress is watching, maybe it’s worth thinking about.

The people who love us the most deserve at least the version of us we give to strangers. Probably better than that.

We can do better. Right?

The best supermarkets in New Jersey

These are the highest-rated supermarkets in each of New Jersey’s 21 counties. The ratings are based on reviews left by customers on Google. To be included in the top, a supermarket had to have a substantial number of reviews (typically at leas a thousand).