Mind you, Boston mayor-elect Marty Walsh’s personal life won’t matter if he screws up the job, but this is still very interesting (boldface mine):

The question hung over the stage where Walsh stood triumphant on election night with Higgins. Walsh, 46, became the first bachelor to win the mayor’s office in more than 60 years. He lives separately from Higgins, a few blocks away in Dorchester. His campaign website described their relationship status this way: “He shares his life with his longtime partner, Lorrie Higgins, and her daughter, Lauren.”

Higgins, 40, works at the State House and waitresses at 224 Boston, a neighborhood restaurant in Dorchester. A single mother of a 21-year-old daughter, she hails from a large family that Walsh had known for years….

Higgins works in politics — not in the limelight, but behind the scenes, for the Legislature’s judiciary committee and State Representative Eugene L. O’Flaherty, a Chelsea Democrat…

Kevin Tyo, the owner and manager of 224 Boston, said Higgins keeps insisting that she’ll return to work, though he can’t imagine it. “How can the mayor’s wife or girlfriend be serving somebody a pizza?” he said.

But Higgins, he said, is “very unconventional,” and “fiercely independent,” so it’s not out of the question.

If Higgins feels the need to give up a job, I suppose she’ll have to stop waiting tables–if nothing else, the government benefits are worth keeping. Though I think it would be great if she kept waiting tables. It might mean someone close to the mayor has an opinion on the minimum wage.

But this arrangement doesn’t strike me as unconventional at all. Higgins is a single mother working two jobs to support herself and her daughter, whose boyfriend happens to be a government employee (Walsh is currently a state representative). Seems kinda normal.

Untraditional in a white picket fence sort of way? Maybe. But in 2013, absolutely ordinary. And far more representative of how we live.