Partner vs. Boyfriend/Girlfriend

This may or may not make sense. It also may or may not make a point.

Recently I have met quite a few people who refer to their significant other as their “partner” as opposed to boyfriend or girlfriend. For me, I’ve mostly heard the term partner used in reference to same sex relationships. This has always confused me a bit because just because the people in involved shared the same anatomy, I never understood why that person wouldn’t simply be your boyfriend or girlfriend. Why partner?

When I worked at Georgetown I had a lot of interaction with the residential life staff through various committees and other work functions. For the most part res life staffers are insanely positive and overly PC. Due to the PC nature of their job, I heard a guy refer to his “partner” in a story. I assumed this guy was gay because of the reference. I later learned he was not. His partner was his girlfriend, but somehow referring to his girlfriend as partner was the new way to not alienate same sex couples. This doesn’t make any sense to me.

I remember when I was a kid my mom used to refer to her friends from high school in stories as girlfriends. This confused me and so as a kid I asked for clarification. She explained it in a perfectly logical way and my little brain started to understand that words can have different definitions being used in various contexts.

Being a hetero dude I have never referred to a girlfriend as anything except girlfriend. I think if I started to use the term partner it’d sound really weird and fake and clearly way too PC than I am or have any aspirations to be. At the same time I could care less about which gender someone else is attracted to. Like any sane person in the world I realize that people are all made differently and so some folks find themselves attracted to people who share the same anatomy, or maybe people with every form of anatomy and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. If a girl who digs other girls calls her significant other her girlfriend it doesn’t change anything about how she feels about that person just as it doesn't change the way I’d feel about my girlfriend. If we defined the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” using the general way that society uses them, the same definition works for both hetero and homo-sexual couples.

I guess my point is I just don’t see the utility value in having a term that was originally used to define the significant other of a same sex couple and then morphed into the PC term so as not to alienate those same sex couples. For me, the feeling of obligation to use such a term is just as alienating as forcing them to call their significant other something other than what everyone else does. Maybe this is a larger overlying problem as our society attempts to move forward. Can we really get past any issue that segregates if we can’t all use the same inclusive vocabulary?