I notice a lot of younger couples use "partner" also. Guess it's more inclusive and less likely to step on gender toes.
I'm part of a girls group that meets up monthly. Ages range from 60s to 30s. One of the 50s women pointed out my use of partner once, which spawned a discussion. To me, it seems like an obvious word to use when someone is in a long term, committed relationship but are not legally married. She would have just said boyfriend or girlfriend. Its becoming more common and acceptable these days to be in relationships like this and they deserve a special term imo. Overall, I think the use of the word partner is almost a cultural shift. It recognizes the importance of the relationship and doesn't cast dispersions. Shacking up, girlfriend, live in boyfriend. I dunno. All the other ways to point out the dynamic seem to not fit properly.
If you have lived together for a length of time, you are married even if you don't have the paperwork to say so.
But the question is if ”living together for a length of time” holds up when it comes time to make medical decisions, inheritance and so on. Marriage isn’t just a piece of paper and an abstract concept like a lot of people think, it grants specific and really important powers in a lot of situations. In most jurisdictions telling the doctor to pull the plug as just a partner, without a pre-signed medical directive has the same power as a random guy off the street walking into the hospital room and demanding the plug be pulled. Here in Sweden it is pretty common that people don’t get married, they just live together and people will often just call their partner their ”sambo”, short for tillsammansboende, or ”cohabitators”. A big issue that is coming around with the aging population is suddenly people’s partners are dying and whoops, sambos don’t inherit without a will. Well if they can’t be bothered to get one piece of paper fixed, guess what other piece of paper they haven’t bothered with. Suddenly the surviving sambo is left with nothing as the dead partners money all goes to their kid from a previous partner, or the deceaseds parents, siblings, grandparents depending on who is alive in the order the inheritance rules follow.
I don’t understand the partner thing. To me it is I don’t want to say I’m dating someone of the same sex/gender. It’s still a boyfriend or a girlfriend. It’s just a weird term. I can wrap my head around wanting to use a “more serious” word for someone who you consider a life long/long term companion but just marry them if you don’t want to say boyfriend/girlfriend. My Deep South may be showing
Maybe not in YOUR part of the country; but I assure you if you head a bit further down towards the equator, the usage rules are a bit more lax.
It doesn't. In the US, "common law" marriage only exists in half a dozen states, and as far as I'm aware, all of them require that you present yourself as a married couple (i.e. actually call yourself husband and wife) if you want to be recognized as such. Even at that, since you don't have documentation, it can present difficulties in real time situations like a medical emergency. If you want to do the long term partnership thing without a marriage certificate, you need to be thoughtful about what it means for your legal relationship. That means medical power-of-attorney docs, making sure your assets have clear beneficiaries, etc. Some things simply won't happen outside of a legal marriage, like social security survivor benefits. If you're both working, that doesn't matter much, but if someone was a stay-at-home parent it might mean they have significantly reduced benefits.
Saying girlfriend or boyfriend when you're a grown ass 40 something and have been with the person for years, live together, maybe even have children together, but aren't officially married, seems juvenile. I had a boyfriend when I was 14. It was not the same realm of relationship to what @Binary has got going on. Maybe I'll start using sambo, to the confusion of everyone around me. *Edit: oh no. I almost forgot about little black sambo. Nevermind.
Yeah, I hate the word and love telling as many Swedes as possible how racist it is to hear as an American. They sort of brush it off, which is strange for a country that is so obsessesed with american race relations that when Circle K opened here there was moral outrage about how some stations had 3 flags with the Circle K logo flying in a row was hugely racist because, I kid you not, ”the KKK”.
So Justin Timberlake got arrested for DWI last night... Welcome to the club, bro. It happens to the best of us. https://apnews.com/article/justin-timberlake-arrest-1980b6ad8d5ae6906f57fe9ef6b7fb18
Why would people in Sweden care about the KKK? They're barely a thing in the US as it is. And why the obsession with US race relations?
I had the same reaction to this story as I did when my wife's dickhead brother (who was just shy of 37, mind you) got his DUI last year. How does a person, in the age of rideshares, in the 21st century, get a fucking DUI?
Virtue signalling, and ignoring the problems here in Sweden. Speaking of race relations, here is Bewildered’s take on race:
My kid's name is Sam. I used to call him Sambo every now and then. I'd forgotten it was a slur, too, until an old white man heard me and laughed.