should you call your significant other your "partner?"
concerning a widespread annoyance
I am not a very observant person, but even I have noticed a shift over the last several years in public opinion toward “partner” as a gender neutral term for a significant other. Some people have had mixed feelings at best toward the term for a long time but today it feeeeels more hotly critiqued than ever. At first “partner” was seemingly a gay term for a lifelong SO, then it became a straight term too, which has led to some confusion among friends of mine who have automatically thought that several very straight people are in fact gay because they used the term “partner.” Even a 2009 article at Feministing brings up this confusion (in mostly LGBT spaces).
“Now, when a straight person working in a mostly-queer environment says, ‘my partner,’ things get tricky. First of all, people will always assume you are queer when you work in the queer movement. Fact. That is how it is and that is how it will probably always be. You know this.”
It is my impression that some straights started calling their SO their partner to normalise use of the term on behalf of the gays, but such I don’t think is the entire story.
Even setting aside progressive linguistic tics, it’s easy to see why the term “partner” would become popular among all sexualities. Nowadays there is a prevalent kind of relationship that sits between “boyfriend/girlfriend” and spouse. Boyfriend or girlfriend can seem deficiently casual for many people’s sense of their non-spousal relationships. “A boyfriend is someone you only see on weekends or someone who could easily ghost you at any time because your lives aren't necessarily so intertwined,” writes Olivia Harrison at Refinery29. Hence, partner. Sometimes people pair off with a lifelong significant other but don’t get married and often don’t want to. Similarly to how “girl” has had to awkwardly expand its meaning to fill a semantic gap in modern English, “partner” has awkwardly filled the semantic gap for such relationships, making it useful for more than just its gender neutrality. The question is whether there are better options.
A side note is worthwhile, given these lifelong but unmarried pairings attract some negative commentary even from people without religious motivations: Given I’m very religious, it might be surprising that I understand the lack of desire to get married to a lifelong SO. Why rely on a state-sanctioned process to get recognition of your love? If you want what has always essentially been a marriage but don’t care to get a legal stamp on it, go ahead. More deeply, I sometimes question whether marriage should be a state procedure at all. “Your love (and often religious commitment) is soooo special, here’s some state bureaucracy to honour it,” can be the vibe if you think about it as if you’re a space alien freshly encountering the concept. Thus I also think you should be able to refer to yourself as married even if you haven’t “legally” married your spouse. (Like, if you go through a whole Jewish wedding but don’t tell Big Brother about it via paperwork, you can say you’re married, if not on tax forms, c’mon.) So, even I have religiously mixed feelings on legal marriage, although I’ll probably get a formal legal marriage if I’m ever married. Various people have various reasons for not wanting to get properly married to their lifelong SO, not just the qualms I listed. And I’m fine with it. Get married, don’t get married, get married in all ways but on paper, be free!
…But let’s get back on topic. This is a bit of a digressive post.
The term “partner” has become annoying to many people, who feel it sounds businesslike or cowboylike or find it semantically confusing because gay-coded. More conservative critics also view it as an annoying manifestation of pointless PC culture. Writing at the National Review, Katherine Timpf critiques the political motivation for using “partner”:
“Sorry — but this is stupid. I’m all for tolerance and love and understanding, but I am 100 percent sure that choosing to call your boyfriend your ‘partner’ instead of your ‘boyfriend’ is going to do absolutely nothing to change the world.”
I hate to do an identity check but when Timpf sez she’s “all for tolerance and love and understanding,” I buy it, given she’s referred to herself as bi or sexually fluid and has dated women. Agree with her or not, she has lived out the evidence for her sincerity. Whatever. Point is I hate that kind of conservative habit when it sounds bogus, but from her it seems authentic, and she’s not all that conservative socially. (Am I overly kneejerk-defensive of certain journalists? Maybe. MOVING ON.)
I don’t mind “partner” as much as many people seem to, but I do find it jarring term and posted a note about it recently.
“why did ‘partner’ become the gender neutral term for your significant other rather than ‘consort?’ the latter sounds more regal by far”
I don’t know why I picked “consort” as the alternative, and many people pointed out its weaknesses. But it wasn’t my main point. Why did “partner,” a term people have had mixed feelings about since the aughts (!!!) but seemingly more so today, become so big? And what does one do with such a fraught term if it works for one’s relationship situation in other ways?
The note got a lot of interesting responses, so I thought I’d highlight a few. Kryptogal (Kate, if you like) had some characteristically sage things to say:
“I think it probably came from the term ‘domestic partner’ which is used to insurance availability. In the US it was used prior to gay marriage being legalized, but also companies allowed for some sharing of benefits by unmarried hetero domestic partners too. And here being able to get insurance from your “partner” is a big deal…
“I mean I'm not saying definitively that's where it came from, but I think it did. Bc no one really used it prior to the gay marriage/civil union/domestic partner debate in the 2000s. We are all desperate for health insurance here, and prior to legalizing gay marriage most big corps started offering ‘domestic partner’ benefits. Which was for gay people but actually unmarried heteros took advantage too if they were living together, I know this bc it's the only reason I had health insurance when I was 24! I think that became the official usage for insurance and corporate speak and then just kind of got shortened to partner. Or like if a corp is sending out invites to a company retreat, they will ask you to RSVP with your partner’s information, and that's the term so they don't inject marital status or sexual orientation into it. So basically the answer to why it sounds so corporat-ey and sterile is because it did indeed first get used by by corporations trying not to run afoul of discrimination laws. And then just kind of got adopted by the public as a catch-all term.”
This was fascinating to me. If it’s accurate, which seems plausible, it’s interesting that the term became popular because of material concerns. Other uses are something like a superstructure. We’re doing a h*cking Marxism today. (Please understand I use that phrasing ironically.)
Substack user Some Vicious Mole came in with another helpful angle:
“It was originally ‘life partner’ (i.e., the term meaning a gay relationship was as serious as a marriage in the opinions of the participants). I think it got changed to ‘domestic partner’ when insurance got involved during the ‘civil unions’ era (because insurance companies wanted you to have the same address, I guess?). Then it got shortened to just ‘partner’ when PC straights started saying it instead of husband/wife to be PC (e.g., Tom Hanks at the 1994 Oscars).”
Here we get some more potential answers to the “why” question. Deeply interesting 2 me.
Now that “partner” is much-maligned in many social arenas, even among gay people, one wonders about alternatives. I’ve seen “lover” posed, for instance, but it has kind of an odd ring to it. Lura Forcum, friend of the pod, posed the dilemma thoughtfully:
“I just had this convo with my significant other. I like consort. I don’t like boyfriend. He doesn’t like partner. I guess I could call him my man, but that sounds like a country song or a Cosmo article.”
A lot of alternatives to “partner” present themselves and none of them seems perfect. Many of them sound overly sexual or outdated or just weird. I wonder what would be a better term, and I don’t really have answers, but I was wondering if y’all (hypothetical readers) have ideas for alternatives or thoughts on “partner” in general. I appreciated a lot more than just the three comments I highlighted here and would love to hear more of y’all’s thinkings.
There are some good reasons to ditch “partner.” I’m not telling anyone to, because I don’t think people need to cave to trends — if they like partner that’s up to them. Terms for one’s own romantic relationship aren’t a popularity contest. But I don’t recall having seen anyone actively step in to defend the term; people who discuss “partner” seem largely to dislike it. It’s politically tinged (to some), semantically confusing at times, and can sound cold. Again, no judgment if you like it, if anything it’ll become cooler if it falls out of style. But a lot of people don’t like it and what they’re to do about this is the big question.
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Maybe I'm in a bubble but I'm British and I think it's just normal here. I wouldn't assume someone's sexuality or or wokeness if they used the word partner. I think boyfriend/girlfriend sounds quite childish in my social circle. I also think it sounds quite nice and not at all corporate to me. Companion on the other hand which is the normal french word brings to mind a very posh kind of carer.
It’s really interesting to look at this from a cross-language perspective. The administrative term for a domestic partner in France is, believe it or not, concubin / concubine. It has not made its way into common parlance!
People will typically use companion, or friend (boy / girl implied). There is also a distinction in common speech between a lover as in someone you’re in love with (amoureux / amoureuse), and a lover as is someone you make love with (amant / amante), and people like to use the former in a cutesy way.
Consort (confrere / consoeur) is strictly used by people who share a profession! It’s what doctors or lawyers call each other, whether they’re in business together or fighting. It feels like partner might feel in English.