What do you call your extra special favorite man or woman when the two of you are strongly/deeply involved with each other but not married plus you are adults in your 30s (or older)? I’m not suggesting there’s a right or wrong answer to this question; I’m just wondering about other people’s points of view on the matter.
It seems a bit silly to me to call that individual your boyfriend/girlfriend, because you’re more than just friends, but mainly because you’re not little boys and girls anymore. I know a lot of adults still use the words boyfriend/girlfriend, but why? Isn’t there something better?
I’m not a big fan of the word lover, which for reason makes me think of married couples cheating on each other or so-called polyandrous people who primarily desire a number of different sex partners, but might think it sounds better to call their multi-partner collections lovers instead of toys.
I don’t want to call him a partner, as that could refer to any number of different things, including a business partner and I am not looking for a relationship that serves as a business model (and ‘relationship’ is another similar word issue, as is ‘love’, but I’ll just stick to one at a time).
I sometimes really like calling an extra special person my ‘favorite thing’, but ‘thing’ is a rather generic word and I don’t want to make someone else feel as if they are a food product, a pet, or a piece of jewelry, when they are so much more than any one thing.
‘Significant other’ isn’t bad, but has similar issues, especially associated with the word ‘other’. Or maybe not; I mean it’s not as if ‘other’ is a negative word; it’s just not a specific word; but when it comes after ‘significant’ it definitely seems to mean something. I guess compared to the other words mentioned above, ‘significant other’ makes the most sense to me, but it still does not seem specific enough or special enough to describe a unique individual that I feel very strongly and passionately about.
Maybe the ‘other’ could be replaced with ‘otherworldly’, but then I start entering into my whole not making much sense to the average person type of vibe – and for the most part, that is okay with me – after all, I am a poet with artsy sensibilities. It would make fun and creative sense to me to call my ‘significant other’ a DELECTABLE POEM CREATURE or a DELIGHTFUL ELIXER or a DELUX PULSATING PORTAL or an EXTRA-SPECIAL MORSEL OF JOY.
But if I were to use one of those sorts of descriptive words in front of a relative, they might not have much of an idea what on earth I was referring too and it’s not like I desire to go out of my way to confuse others. I guess when it comes down to introducing my special someone to a regular person, I could just refer to him as my friend (or just say his name) and save those strange creative words to use in front of him.
I don’t really have a problem with that or consider it to be a big issue, but I do find it a bit oddly interesting that so many non-married but committed adults still use the words boyfriend/girlfriend – and thus I found myself wondering how some other people felt about these kinds of descriptive words and what kinds of words they might use.