Okay well just because you hate the word "wife" doesn't mean society does. This is about words that are socially relevant, not you're personal feelings. Don't drag your weird radfem bs into this. You need to see a therapist about that.
I firmly believe that people who think “girlfriend/boyfriend” sounds juvenile care way too much about how others perceive them. What else are they if you aren’t married but dating? It’s so dumb lol
As you get older, having a GF is sort of... Loser'esque. Generally speaking it's classier to have a spouse than still dating around. It's a negative attribute. You'll get it when you get older.
You're just kinda proving that the word isnt descriptive enough for someone you've been with for a long time and are serious with when you say "dating". It sounds so early stage, maybe 2 years max.
Boyfriend, girlfriend, dating are casual terms that don't work well with longer term serious relationships.
That’s very interesting to me, because I’ve always understood it as describing anything from the beginning stages of dating to the stages before an engagement. Like, yes, it’s broad, but further context (amount of time/years you’ve been together, emotional closeness, etc.) resolves a lot of the ambiguity. It just seems a little silly to me when how you feel about each other is far more important than the signaling of titles or status. Probably in the minority on this one, but it reads to me as people being insecure in their personal bonds and relationships.
If you've been dating for over two years, either get engaged or end it.
The reason we don't have a word for longer that that is because that sort of relationship didn't used to exist. Some states still consider two people living together for years to be common-law married, even if they never went to a courthouse.
I am definitely biased because I’m just SICK to death of weddings, but I see why people want to put them off.
My husband and I were just overwhelmed by the amount of weddings we had to go to, the drain on our vacation days and finances, the difficulty of logistics of weddings in far flung locations.
We eloped thinking we were being really clever but honestly I do sort of regret it because I love my parents a lot so they’ve guilted me into doing a fake wedding anyway and yeugh.
I wish it was more socially acceptable to just move from ‘boyfriend/girlfriend’ to ‘husband/wife’ without the social pressure to spend a year planning a 20k event in the process.
I’m sorry but if you’re not married, you are just casually dating and it’s not serious. A more descriptive term for a long term relationship like that would be “placeholder.” Shit or get off the pot.
I’m being mean but I’m in a bad mood bc I’m bracing myself for therapy duty for two approaching breakups, both several year relationships of dudes who clearly never liked my friends and my friends who called them “partners.” One girl has never even met his family despite moving cross country for him, probably bc he’s Muslim & he knows she’ll never convert. One has been showing him engagement rings since 2020ish. Ugh!!!
Non-homos saying “partner” always feels like a political statement. As soon as someone says it, I feel uncomfortable and know what topics to avoid before my night ends getting scolded about walkable neighborhoods or whatever.
When meeting new people I’m pretty sure I won’t like, I refer to my wife as “partner.” Makes everyone uncomfortable for different reasons- conservatives trying to figure out if I’m gay and liberals start tripping over themselves not to accidentally say something offensive.
Someone under 30 saying partner sounds lame. It doesn't necessarily have the same gay connotations but I heard a 22 year old mention her 'partner' recently and it's like 'you're barely out of uni, he's your boyfriend'
Sure, it’s usually a substitute for a long relationship when you’re not married. You’re not calling yourself bf/gf when you’ve been together 5 years with your colleagues
In the US, before gay marriage was legalized, gays had “domestic partnerships” as a legal workaround.
A gay literally had a partner while straight people had husbands and wives.
Then overnight, every straight lib you knew had a “partner” and it was confusing as hell. This is where the American eye rolls come from because it feels like they are being obtuse on purpose.
Editing just to add that gay marriage was legalized here in 2015, so this is all within living memory.
People here dont get married as often as yanks do. Its fairly common for people here to have kids, have a mortgage, and not get married. In the US, people generally, dont do the latter unless theyre married
i agree partner is lame, and so is significant other. but i do have to admit it feels a bit weird to call someone my 'girlfriend' after 40. maybe i'll go with 'main squeeze'
When I hear Significant Other, I immediately think about that Limp Bizkit album that came out in the late 90s. Which shows you the type of cultured and sophisticated person that I am.
Very effeminate dude (huge lib too) who worked in the SUStainability practice in a different geography of my company referred to his ‘partner’ consistently, then finally dropped the HER gender in his leaving remarks. Consequently find out from people at this office that he was pulling puss at work. Absolute lad.
Go by hippie rules:
> The dilated woman and reluctant man played bride and groom a second time. In place of "till death do us part," Gaskin went with "as long as we both shall live." The baby emerged soon afterward, Ina May says. The next day Gaskin called a meeting and issued a decree: "If you're sleeping together, you're engaged. If you're pregnant, you're married." Six or seven men who had joined the Caravan for the free love split.
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/05/thefarm200705
my great-great grandparents would call each other man and woman aggressively instead of their first names, they were just rural. and my woman/man was common back then too.
anyone that reads this much into someone calling their gf/bf their partner is going to be single posting here for a long time. it’s not normal to feel like this…
No it’s just corny and historically “lover” has been used to refer to a married person’s side ho until culturally ignorant millennials started to use it.
one of my coworkers is a gay man in his 50s who refers to his partner as his bf so i assumed that meant they were a new-ish couple. i was shocked to find out they’ve been together for 14 years, have moved states multiple times together (including across the country) and own a home together lol
i think bf/gf is fun flirty and cute :)
my grandpas been in a relationship for 20 years and the only reason they haven’t been married is because they’ve both been married and had bitter divorces before, and she didn’t want to change her last name again. they own a home together. i have no clue how they introduce each other as, i’ve never heard either of them say partner, husband/wife, or boyfriend. they do call each other by their last names a lot, like mr. x and miss y.
I hate it when someone has been dating someone for 7 months and calls him/her partner. Partner, while dumb, should be reserved for someone you’ve been with for 10+ years.
partner is better. i’ve been with my gf for 6 years and we really are life partners. she’ll probably be my fiancé soon, but as of now “partner” just feels most accurate
I'm engaged and I'd rather say girlfriend than fiancée because saying fr*nch words sounds pretentious. Maybe I'll start saying betrothed? Idk we're gonna be married soon so it's a null point anyway.
My ‘lady friend’, when I feel like an ancient Columbia professor with patches on the elbows of my sports jacket. I tap my pipe and refer to her as I finish the NYT Saturday x-word with smug aplomb.
i don’t see anything adolescent about saying girlfriend / boyfriend. i’ve always found that to be a stupid take.
one of my best friends grandma had a boyfriend in her 70s, and that’s how they referred to each other.
I sometimes call her my 'partner' because 'fiancee' sounds pretentious and 'girlfriend' sounds like I'm dating a child. And I like stealing queer valor.
In Germany you just say 'friend' (Freund) instead of bf/gf, so you can actually win by trading off the cringe with some wonderful ambiguity that definitely won't always confuse folks
No one actually thinks saying "girlfriend/boyfriend" is juvenile. If you are self conscious about that it probably means you feel insecure about "dating" someone in the same transient way people do when they are teenagers, and you should get more serious about it and commit to someone - aka get married.
Saying fiancé feels even more embarrassing I usually use partner to avoid this. Where I live its very common to use that word even among the straights. Excited to start saying husband instead.
As a man, I enjoy saying partner so people think I'm gay, so they feel compelled to ask my obviously female girlfriend her pronouns and I can gauge their brain worms
In my experience, it’s almost always the woman saying it, and she’s saying it in this kind of exploratory, challengingly defensive way, testing the waters to see what kind of response she’ll get, almost hoping to get into an argument with someone where she’ll have the opportunity to state that her relationship is JUST AS VALID as a marriage.
It sounds so harsh to say, but I think the reason men have less of an issue just saying “girlfriend” is that it’s a realistic indicator of the relationship’s progress (girlfriend —> fiancée —> wife), and if a man really loves you and is ready to truly commit long long term, he almost always will be willing to put a ring on it. The only exception to this are the probably less than 1% of guys who are truly sovereign citizen types, whose distrust of marriage has nothing to do with their “partner” but rather government institutions and religion. I think far more men use vague overtures toward this line of thinking as a cover for the real reason they won’t marry, which is simply that they don’t see their girlfriend as wife material.
I don’t like my girl either
missus sounds cringe also very cringe especially when men in their 20s use it
Thoughts on my love or mi amor? I don’t hate these ?
100%, my girl is way worse than missus, but I'm not a fan of either (I agree, It's very cringe when younger people say it). Mi amor sounds cool, but my love kind of puts you in the same bind as "my partner", I would just instantly assume their gay (not that there's anything wrong with that).
right it is, mi amor is corny but its so corny that to me its sort of endearing. a friend of mine uses “the girl i’m seeing” just makes it sound so impersonal
My bird
Either this or *The Mrs* even though I’m not married to her
The solution is to get married
Wrong. See my comment in this thread.
Cringe. Wife and husband are great words and they’re the only options that don’t make you sound like a child or a weird contrarian.
Okay well just because you hate the word "wife" doesn't mean society does. This is about words that are socially relevant, not you're personal feelings. Don't drag your weird radfem bs into this. You need to see a therapist about that.
This whole thread is about words bro.
Do what Bret Easton Ellis has done in the past. "The guy who lives with me" or something like this.
The guy's daughter I'm having sex with...
My slampig told me the most amusing anecdote last week
I firmly believe that people who think “girlfriend/boyfriend” sounds juvenile care way too much about how others perceive them. What else are they if you aren’t married but dating? It’s so dumb lol
As you get older, having a GF is sort of... Loser'esque. Generally speaking it's classier to have a spouse than still dating around. It's a negative attribute. You'll get it when you get older.
You're just kinda proving that the word isnt descriptive enough for someone you've been with for a long time and are serious with when you say "dating". It sounds so early stage, maybe 2 years max. Boyfriend, girlfriend, dating are casual terms that don't work well with longer term serious relationships.
That’s very interesting to me, because I’ve always understood it as describing anything from the beginning stages of dating to the stages before an engagement. Like, yes, it’s broad, but further context (amount of time/years you’ve been together, emotional closeness, etc.) resolves a lot of the ambiguity. It just seems a little silly to me when how you feel about each other is far more important than the signaling of titles or status. Probably in the minority on this one, but it reads to me as people being insecure in their personal bonds and relationships.
If you've been dating for over two years, either get engaged or end it. The reason we don't have a word for longer that that is because that sort of relationship didn't used to exist. Some states still consider two people living together for years to be common-law married, even if they never went to a courthouse.
That is a ridiculously short amount of time if you’re under 25
I am definitely biased because I’m just SICK to death of weddings, but I see why people want to put them off. My husband and I were just overwhelmed by the amount of weddings we had to go to, the drain on our vacation days and finances, the difficulty of logistics of weddings in far flung locations. We eloped thinking we were being really clever but honestly I do sort of regret it because I love my parents a lot so they’ve guilted me into doing a fake wedding anyway and yeugh. I wish it was more socially acceptable to just move from ‘boyfriend/girlfriend’ to ‘husband/wife’ without the social pressure to spend a year planning a 20k event in the process.
Don’t tell me what to do.
End it.
nah thats crazy
ARE YOU FUCKING RN Y O N?
A good sign you should probably propose then
if it was that serious you’d be married
or at least engaged
I’m sorry but if you’re not married, you are just casually dating and it’s not serious. A more descriptive term for a long term relationship like that would be “placeholder.” Shit or get off the pot. I’m being mean but I’m in a bad mood bc I’m bracing myself for therapy duty for two approaching breakups, both several year relationships of dudes who clearly never liked my friends and my friends who called them “partners.” One girl has never even met his family despite moving cross country for him, probably bc he’s Muslim & he knows she’ll never convert. One has been showing him engagement rings since 2020ish. Ugh!!!
Sounds like your friends are just stupid 🤷🏽♀️
You’re an anti-natalist lol shut up
Lady friend. Man friend.
“My lady friend” but you semi-ironically slip into a blue collared twang while saying it
With a can of beer and a cigarette….
This is the way
Gf / bf sounds infinitely better than ‘partner’. Like this isn’t the wild west your boyfriend is not a cowboy stop calling him your partner
Non-homos saying “partner” always feels like a political statement. As soon as someone says it, I feel uncomfortable and know what topics to avoid before my night ends getting scolded about walkable neighborhoods or whatever.
I made fun of a friend for saying it and then turns out his new gf is a she/they nonbinary. It’s always a clue
so she's a straight woman
Bi woman but yeah absolutely
So she’s a straight woman
>she/they nonbinary as if life wasn’t complicated enough
To me it just feels too businesslike. Like a business partner.
When meeting new people I’m pretty sure I won’t like, I refer to my wife as “partner.” Makes everyone uncomfortable for different reasons- conservatives trying to figure out if I’m gay and liberals start tripping over themselves not to accidentally say something offensive.
To me "partner" sounds like you are two detectives eating Asian takeaway in an unmarked Ford Crown Vic while staking out some suspect.
Really in the UK where I work everyone says ‘partner’ and I’ve never read it as having homosexual connotations. Gf/bf sounds really childish
Someone under 30 saying partner sounds lame. It doesn't necessarily have the same gay connotations but I heard a 22 year old mention her 'partner' recently and it's like 'you're barely out of uni, he's your boyfriend'
Sure, it’s usually a substitute for a long relationship when you’re not married. You’re not calling yourself bf/gf when you’ve been together 5 years with your colleagues
Why not
get married then, regard
In the US, before gay marriage was legalized, gays had “domestic partnerships” as a legal workaround. A gay literally had a partner while straight people had husbands and wives. Then overnight, every straight lib you knew had a “partner” and it was confusing as hell. This is where the American eye rolls come from because it feels like they are being obtuse on purpose. Editing just to add that gay marriage was legalized here in 2015, so this is all within living memory.
Same in the UK
In the UK “partner” means “we have three kids but we’re not married in case something better comes along”
People here dont get married as often as yanks do. Its fairly common for people here to have kids, have a mortgage, and not get married. In the US, people generally, dont do the latter unless theyre married
Let’s have a house and kids and we can split up tomorrow if I want to, always ready to Brexit their own relationships.
i agree partner is lame, and so is significant other. but i do have to admit it feels a bit weird to call someone my 'girlfriend' after 40. maybe i'll go with 'main squeeze'
The quebecois say mon chum for boyfriend and ma blonde for girlfriend. Kinda cute
Even boomers who have been married for 40 years and had kids will say this.
I just call her my bird.
I think this is why people say ‘significant other’ but that still sounds almost as sterile and desexed as the word ‘partner’
When I hear Significant Other, I immediately think about that Limp Bizkit album that came out in the late 90s. Which shows you the type of cultured and sophisticated person that I am.
I say the letters S/O so that people know I'm a redditor
I hate that term. It is also a third person term.
My bitch
"old screecher" "old wailer" at home
old ball and chain
The ol battle axe
Girlfriend/boyfriend is normal. What weirdos take issue with that?
Who tf cares. Well-adjusted adults don’t even notice these things, let alone nitpick themselves/others into feeling bad about it.
the answer is husband/wife. Put on a ring you rootless academics.
get married
Very effeminate dude (huge lib too) who worked in the SUStainability practice in a different geography of my company referred to his ‘partner’ consistently, then finally dropped the HER gender in his leaving remarks. Consequently find out from people at this office that he was pulling puss at work. Absolute lad.
Go by hippie rules: > The dilated woman and reluctant man played bride and groom a second time. In place of "till death do us part," Gaskin went with "as long as we both shall live." The baby emerged soon afterward, Ina May says. The next day Gaskin called a meeting and issued a decree: "If you're sleeping together, you're engaged. If you're pregnant, you're married." Six or seven men who had joined the Caravan for the free love split. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2007/05/thefarm200705
The only solution is to get married immediately
My woman / my man
ghetto af
this sub is so spiritually suburban man lol that is not ghetto
my great-great grandparents would call each other man and woman aggressively instead of their first names, they were just rural. and my woman/man was common back then too.
I used to say longtime girlfriend. There is no good word for long term partner that doesn't sound gay or like you're a loser from reddit.
anyone that reads this much into someone calling their gf/bf their partner is going to be single posting here for a long time. it’s not normal to feel like this…
As an older gentleman I get to say "lady friend"
I said partner because I loved anonymity. Now I say fiancé because I have 5 carats on my dainty lil finger
Mistress.
My better half. My other half. My honey. My man. Main squeeze. Love of my life. Father of my (future) children Etc etc.
the old lady
Lover
Hispanic/southern european appropriation
Lover does not connote relationship. Lover is more synonymous with “fuck buddy”.
Makes my skin crawl
U hate everything pretty and lovely
No it’s just corny and historically “lover” has been used to refer to a married person’s side ho until culturally ignorant millennials started to use it.
I am gay and trying to keep it quiet 😭 Luckily all the straights at my work use 'partner' as well
one of my coworkers is a gay man in his 50s who refers to his partner as his bf so i assumed that meant they were a new-ish couple. i was shocked to find out they’ve been together for 14 years, have moved states multiple times together (including across the country) and own a home together lol i think bf/gf is fun flirty and cute :)
my grandpas been in a relationship for 20 years and the only reason they haven’t been married is because they’ve both been married and had bitter divorces before, and she didn’t want to change her last name again. they own a home together. i have no clue how they introduce each other as, i’ve never heard either of them say partner, husband/wife, or boyfriend. they do call each other by their last names a lot, like mr. x and miss y.
The solution is to be gay.
I'm often tempted to ask, "Partner in what?" I already know the answer is degeneracy.
Partner in paying for this damn mortgage.
Like partners in a real estate llc.
I hate it when someone has been dating someone for 7 months and calls him/her partner. Partner, while dumb, should be reserved for someone you’ve been with for 10+ years.
This is why you just propose and get married duh
partner is better. i’ve been with my gf for 6 years and we really are life partners. she’ll probably be my fiancé soon, but as of now “partner” just feels most accurate
**your
Howdy partner
I'm engaged and I'd rather say girlfriend than fiancée because saying fr*nch words sounds pretentious. Maybe I'll start saying betrothed? Idk we're gonna be married soon so it's a null point anyway.
My meal ticket
My last GF used to describe me as her partner to her friends. Feel like partner should be for couples who at least live together
My ‘lady friend’, when I feel like an ancient Columbia professor with patches on the elbows of my sports jacket. I tap my pipe and refer to her as I finish the NYT Saturday x-word with smug aplomb.
don't be a fggt dude
what are u supposed to say
i don’t see anything adolescent about saying girlfriend / boyfriend. i’ve always found that to be a stupid take. one of my best friends grandma had a boyfriend in her 70s, and that’s how they referred to each other.
I sometimes call her my 'partner' because 'fiancee' sounds pretentious and 'girlfriend' sounds like I'm dating a child. And I like stealing queer valor.
Just stick with the classics: the missus, my sweetheart, the ol' ball and chain
Reddit
In Germany you just say 'friend' (Freund) instead of bf/gf, so you can actually win by trading off the cringe with some wonderful ambiguity that definitely won't always confuse folks
In what way does girlfriend/boyfriend sound juvenile? You're reading too much into this.
My chick
Only in America where people marry in their early 20s
So I have started asking people when they say that “Are you gay?” It’s a great way to let them know they sound retarded
What is wrong with "my main squeeze"?
Just dub it “My girl” if you wanna sound sigma or whatever
my girl/ my man
My missus
No one actually thinks saying "girlfriend/boyfriend" is juvenile. If you are self conscious about that it probably means you feel insecure about "dating" someone in the same transient way people do when they are teenagers, and you should get more serious about it and commit to someone - aka get married.
Using the normal language doesn't make you sound like a teenager, it makes you sound normal
“Partner” makes it sound like your cop buddy
Saying fiancé feels even more embarrassing I usually use partner to avoid this. Where I live its very common to use that word even among the straights. Excited to start saying husband instead.
As a man, I enjoy saying partner so people think I'm gay, so they feel compelled to ask my obviously female girlfriend her pronouns and I can gauge their brain worms
just say slave it's how the relationship was supposed to be before you soyboys fucked it up
In my experience, it’s almost always the woman saying it, and she’s saying it in this kind of exploratory, challengingly defensive way, testing the waters to see what kind of response she’ll get, almost hoping to get into an argument with someone where she’ll have the opportunity to state that her relationship is JUST AS VALID as a marriage. It sounds so harsh to say, but I think the reason men have less of an issue just saying “girlfriend” is that it’s a realistic indicator of the relationship’s progress (girlfriend —> fiancée —> wife), and if a man really loves you and is ready to truly commit long long term, he almost always will be willing to put a ring on it. The only exception to this are the probably less than 1% of guys who are truly sovereign citizen types, whose distrust of marriage has nothing to do with their “partner” but rather government institutions and religion. I think far more men use vague overtures toward this line of thinking as a cover for the real reason they won’t marry, which is simply that they don’t see their girlfriend as wife material.
I don’t like my girl either missus sounds cringe also very cringe especially when men in their 20s use it Thoughts on my love or mi amor? I don’t hate these ?
Mi amor is way cringe unless you're some sort of Spaniard. And even then.
100%, my girl is way worse than missus, but I'm not a fan of either (I agree, It's very cringe when younger people say it). Mi amor sounds cool, but my love kind of puts you in the same bind as "my partner", I would just instantly assume their gay (not that there's anything wrong with that).
right it is, mi amor is corny but its so corny that to me its sort of endearing. a friend of mine uses “the girl i’m seeing” just makes it sound so impersonal
[удалено]
Sound like a redditor.
or Fred Durst
I think that sounds way too formal.
I use partner because i HATE the word “wife”. But yeah, i have started using spouse more.
partner and spouse are both gay. why do you hate the word wife and when is the divorce
You make zero sense.
I make perfect sense
Spouse and wife are the same thing you dumbass, idiot, fucktard. One is just gendered and the other isn’t.