A close friend — educated in the West but who moved back to Tehran after the revolution and who has spent the last 35 years hoping that things one day might improve to the point where he could sell some assets, recover others, make a couple of business deals and retire in the West with the proceeds — said to me on the day of the announcement of the nuclear deal with the United States and its partners: “Well, I’ve waited 35 years. Now I can wait a couple more if that’s what it’ll take to get to normal.”

Yes, normal. That’s what Iranians are hoping for, and what they’ll be satisfied with. If other constraints on life beyond the financial are lifted as well, as President Hassan Rouhani has promised, I suspect that retirement in the West won’t really be in my friend’s future.

The deal is certainly good for Iran, if the measure is its popularity among ordinary people. But it is not popular for reasons that some might suggest: that Iran bamboozled the West into a terrible compromise if not appeasement and therefore the nationalistic and prideful people are celebrating victory over the Great Satan. That certainly, however, could be what some Iranian viewers surmised just from having watched the American congressional hearings — broadcast unprecedentedly live on State TV — if they paid close attention to what the detractors of the deal were lecturing Secretary of State John Kerry and Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz about. But, no, the Iranian people long ago, depending on their political leanings, resigned themselves to the fact or satisfied themselves that their government, or more precisely the nezam — the Islamic system — would never agree to humiliation by, let alone surrender to, foreign powers, no matter the cost to the nation.

What Iranians were celebrating on the evening of July 14 was their version (and perhaps as significant for them) of the storming of the Bastille — a potential break with an order that included sanctions, isolation, vilification of their country, and, more importantly, their own 36 years of struggle for normalcy. From the congratulatory text messages that Iranians sent to each other, and the anxious wall-to-wall television, radio, Internet and newspaper coverage of the nuclear deal reached in Vienna, to the spontaneous street celebrations in big cities that evening, Iranians were breathing a sigh of relief that maybe, just maybe, things can get better for them economically, socially and politically.