Things used to be more or less clear: if you started to get serious with someone, after a while you started calling that person boyfriend or girlfriend. If there was a wedding, the term was automatically changed to husband and wife. And for lighter stages of commitment, there was a whole range of options available to the speaker that varied depending on the geography and the jargon of the moment: girls, churris and else. They say that when the journalist Letizia Ortiz began dating the then Prince Felipe, she took him to parties and introduced him to her friends as “my boy”, as a way to take iron away from what was coming.
But all that more or less regulated convention seems to have blown up. On the one hand, the use of the gender-neutral term has increased partner, which leaves in the air if we refer to a man, a woman or a non-binary person, and on the other hand, the question of husband and wife has been problematized. In the first place, there are fewer and fewer people who can be called that because the number of weddings plummets (between 1996 and 2021 it fell by 24%, according to INE data), but it also happens that there are married couples who avoid it because it sounds old and they find the term questionable woman (since the husband is not called men). And then there are the couples who have not signed any document and use partner because they have been together for a long time or have had children and they are embarrassed —or it falls short— to refer to someone with whom they have half a mortgage as a girlfriend or boyfriend.
“Sometimes I say ‘my husband’ even though we are not married to go faster if I talk to people in a more formal context, like at work,” explains Núria Termes, 42, who has three children with her partner. “Speaking in Catalan, I use my home”. That word, my man, has traditionally been used to replace the more formal marit and makes an equivalence with the meva donanamely, my wife. In Spanish, on the other hand, nobody says my man in response to my wife which almost always replaces my wife in the colloquial register. “I find it very funny as an expression,” admits Termes. “Before children I said boyfriend. I do not use partner because it seems a bit artificial to me, although the truth is that it would solve the problem for me”.
The debate around partner
Regarding the growing use of the term partner among heterosexual people a debate that arises from time to timealso in the English-speaking world. Should straight people use the term partner?the web of style (and not exclusively LGBT) wondered InsideHook last year. “I don’t like it when the Cishetero people use partner [pareja] to describe your heterosexual partner. me, a fucking fagot [SIC]I still don’t feel comfortable calling my boyfriend partner. I think they call their boyfriends or husbands partner it is something self-indulgent and pompous for the cishetero people, ”said a tweeter in 2020.
I don’t like when cis straight people use “partner” to describe their heterosexual spouse. I, a fucking fagot, am still not comfortable calling my same-sex boyfriend “partner.” I think calling a bf/gf/spouse “partner“ is self-indulgent/pompous for straight cis people.
— michael hansen (@MichaelHansen) February 20, 2020
This was posted on Twitter two years ago by an American sustainability consultant named Michael Hansen and points to an opinion that is being heard more and more, half seriously, half jokingly: when cisgender heterosexuals say partner, some voices of the LGBTQ community believe that they steal that term, widely used for its semantic breadth or, in an area where someone wants to keep privacy, indicate that they are in a relationship without revealing the sex of the other member. “There’s nothing wrong with straight people calling partner to their a couple Y girlfriendsbut when they do it to look modern or hide that they are not straight, it is a) very obvious and b) very irritating, ”another tweeter replied, Javier.
In English, the word partnerunderstood as “half of a heterosexual couple”, already appears even in paradise lostby John Milton, in the middle of the 17th century, but it was sealed to couples queer in the aftermath of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, when it became clear that a term (and legislation) was needed for people of the same sex who were in a stable and lasting union, but who had no bond in the eyes of the law and , therefore, they did not enjoy rights when, for example, visiting their partners in hospital or staying in the houses they had both occupied if one of them died.
Already at the end of the 1970s, some local laws in the United States, such as the Berkeley Sexual Orientation Non-Discrimination Ordinance, passed in 1978, put down in writing the idea of domestic partner (domestic partner) as the closest thing to a same-sex husband. A linguist named Peter Sokolowski, in charge of updating the Merriem Webster dictionary, explained it in an article on the women’s website Refinery29 titled Us and our partners, why is it so difficult to know what to call your better half?, in which the author, a cisgender and heterosexual woman, wondered if using the more progressive partner I would not be incurring in something similar to cultural appropriation.
“Before, when I said ‘partner’, I did think that people might think I’m a lesbian, and when I heard it myself I inferred that it was someone of the same sex, but it doesn’t happen to me anymore, perhaps because it’s more widespread, and I usually refer to it that way to my boyfriend,” says Jessica Fernández, a 39-year-old communicator who currently lives in Japan. “I don’t think if it’s a boy or a girl because I don’t care,” says her friend Esther Esteban, who is dedicated to film production in the Canary Islands and is also close to 40. “I’ve been with my boyfriend for six years and I mean him informally like my boy. Or sometimes my churri either the father of my daughter”. The latter, by the way, is also spreading in families with children, but it also poses some problems, since whoever hears it can infer that it is a separated couple.
To Júlia Codina, a 27-year-old political scientist, partner sounds less possessive than boyfriend. “I don’t pretend to be gender neutral, but for whatever reason it sounds better to me and I don’t think it counts as appropriation of anything. I think it is good and its use should be extended more”, she says. Like many other people, he generally avoids affectionate names outside of intimacy (“nothing my love”) and prefers to avoid any type of charge to the people he is with. The solution, for her, is to use the first name whenever possible. “I do the same,” admits Natalia Rodríguez, a 39-year-old publicist. “But in general I have found that I say partner when I want to sound finer”.
Adapting to the record and the situation is actually the most common: use husband either womanregardless of whether or not there has been a wedding, when talking to the bank clerk, the president of the ladder, or a prospective landlord or employer and boyfriend either girlfriend either partner in other types of contexts.
beyond two
Outside of monogamy, new questions are also raised. How to call those with whom a stable polyamorous relationship is maintained? Or to a succession of couples that can overlap in time? There, too, creative solutions are emerging. Alfonso Blanco is a 29-year-old photographer who has been away from the idea of the traditional couple for quite some time: “Sometimes I say partner, although not much. Y boyfriend, girlfriend either boyfriend I don’t like it because I don’t have monogamous relationships.” Alfonso provides a well-known classic: lover. “I like the possibility of talking about lovers, in plural. I admit that I have respect for the word boyfriend, but in the end, even if it is polyamorous, the codes and terminology that exist are those of monogamy and romantic love and I have to adapt. It doesn’t bother me that straight cisgender people use partner nor do I see it as cultural appropriation. As a bisexual person I try not to think in a homonormative way.” The only time, she says, that she adopted the girlfriend It was when I was dating a cis straight girl and they were both traveling abroad.
His friend Marcos Bartolomé, a 27-year-old researcher and professor, has also encountered this dilemma. “As a non-monogamous person, I try to avoid the word boyfriend, although there have also been times when I have used it consciously to give legitimacy to my sexual-affective bond, because I feel that if not, the importance that person has in my life will not be lost. Sometimes I force the boyfriend and other times I avoid it with all kinds of stratagems, like using words in Asturian. so i say my soda either my soda, which is an Asturian way of saying lover without giving it much weight. If you say lover, people already understand that there is no exclusivity, but if you say boyfriend Yes”.
In reality, languages have always sought ways to put words to complex realities with many nuances. “My parents, aged 74 and 68, always say partner and I find it super pretty”, explains Marinha Pino. She, 34, is more than partner when it has it, the word that seems called to prevail, unless all Spanish speakers finally agree and look at Chile, which already has the best words for semi-stable romantic love: boyfriend Y girlfriend.
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