To think many posters are very weird about the word ‘partner’?

[Savante]

I’ve noticed it for years and find it so bizarre.

If a poster says she’s been with her partner for five years but they don’t live together there are screams of ‘you don’t even live together. He's your boyfriend’.

If she says they live together but have only been together for a year it’s ’not sure why you’re calling him your partner. He's barely a boyfriend’.

And then on the flip side, if a woman calls her husband her partner, presumably due to habit, she gets leapt on with ‘why are you calling your husband your partner OP’.

Am I missing something? Is there some strict definition of partner I’ve missed?

It irritates the fuck out of me, unreasonable or not.

Oh I’m not so sure. I always saw a certain spark there

This is the kind of situation where "partner" is totally appropriate and correcf, it's the perfect word.

Do you think it's appropriate for someone to use the same word for someone she's been on 4 dates with and who is now having the temerity to go on holiday/to a wedding/accepting a new job in a different city without her?

@Jamesblonde2 shockingly in 2026 many women now have successful careers and perhaps even more income and assets than their partner. So they may not want to be married for legal and financial reasons. Boyfriend sounds very childish, so partner seems sensible.

I don’t care what word other people use to describe the person they’re in a relationship with. Personally, we mostly stopped using boyfriend/girlfriend when we had been together about 5 years, shared finances and had our first child together. One disgruntled relative kept insisting he was still ‘just my bf’, as she thought we should be married. She seemed to get even more annoyed that I said I didn’t care that she referred to my partner as my bf when introducing him to others. 😅

We’ve now been together almost 30 years and have 2 children. Someone called my partner, my husband, to this relative once and she really lost her shit. She clearly sees us as lesser as we’re not married. My partner told her that he could call me his ‘friends with benefits’ if that felt better for her as he doesn’t like ‘girlfriend’, and she doesn’t like ‘partner’. She wasn’t happy with that. 🤣

A bit different, but the only time I’ve ever rolled my eyes at what someone calls themselves was a woman on here referring to herself as ‘step mum’ to children when she had only been in a relationship with the children’s dad for 6 weeks. I just thought poor kids.

I like "partner" because it's a bland catch-all. It gives nothing away. That's very useful in small-talk situations with colleagues or people you don't know well or relatives prone to nosiness: it presents them with nothing to go on, because it's none of their business.

For LGBT people all the above is also crucial for their actual safety.

As someone who is soon going to marry her long-term partner and hates the word "husband", I might stick with "partner" anyway.

My relative who didn’t like ‘partner’ actually said it made me sound like I was a lesbian and that was one reason why she wasn’t happy with the term. 🙄🙄🙄 I told her that it would teach people not to assume and that she should stop being homophobic.

What if he's legally your civil partner? Not husband but definitely different to a 62 year old boyfriend.

When we got married more than one person has questioned my use of wife because they assumed it was a civil partnership and one (who was at the bloody wedding!) said something that was akin to "oh, we have a marriage though which is different" in a way that clearly assumed that because she had a hetro wedding that she had some kind of different rights

I've also encountered people (as some people have said theyve done on this thread!) in my nhs work setting when I've used the word partner whilst running the group (ie. If your partner can go stand on the left) very grumpy manor that they dont have a partner they are my husband/wife etc. As if I'm meant to memorise the status of every single patient then say "boyfriends, girlfriends, situationships, friends wit benefits,legal partners, husbands and wives or those who cant decide' off to the side please.

But yes in general if you picture a regular 64 year old burly man, picking up a spouses car from a typical garage is going to face a different reaction if he asks for his boyfriends car vs his partners car. Its a risk that has to be calculated

I did too! I loved calling him my lover 😃

I'd been married before (v young) so i'd done the 'boyfriend' to 'husband' bit already.

Then in my 30s met now DH and boyfriend sounded twee. We were together 2 years together before we started living together and i thoroughly enjoyed calling him my lover 😍

Then it had to be partner until we married and i didn't like it.

I distinctly remember actor Robert Lyndsey accepting an award and saying thank you to his lover. Teenage me thought it the most cringe thing is ever heard. It seemed very unusual in that context!

Why not just say boyfriend?

It's not a dirty word.

Because people prefer partner.

What is so hard to understand. I haven't had a boyfriend since my teens.

Me and my partner have been together for 16 years. Hes not a boyfriend

I find it confusing tbh using partner but that is due to experience.

I didn’t hear partner used unless a person was in a same-sex relationship or for business/work relationship until I moved to the UK. It was either boyfriend/girlfriend, spouse, wife/husband, partner (if in same-sex relationship).

I wouldn’t dare correct anyone on how they choose to name their status/relationship. If they say partner, I’m not going to ask for clarification unless they ask me for advice because it may change the advice.

Some people don't like it being called out, because the word partner quite rightly gives a lot more weight to the relationship and means a usually long term relationship living together as defacto man and wife - rather than just boyfriend/girlfriend. Just as being married gives a LOT more weight to the entire relationship.

There very definitely is a hierarchy of relationships, boyfriend or girlfriend is absolutely accurate when you don't live together.

It doesn't matter whether that's annoys you, it's still true. Everyone thinks of your boyfriend/girlfriend as your boyfriend/girlfriend - particularly if you've been together years and still don't live together. Most of us will just say nothing because we don't care nearly as much as you do - but being online lets people tell the truth.

Call yourself whatever you like, of course, it's not like anybody's stopping you 😂

I prefer OH, than partner, but I don't have an issue with partner where others are concerned. I just wouldn't use it for my relationship if I wasn't married.

I've been married for over 25 years and before that, everyone was a boyfriend.

I do find it a little strange when people say partner, about a man they've been in a LDR with and have no plans to change that. I don't understand how that's a partnership, when you see each other a few times a year.

If you'd doing life together, then that's a partner IMO.

In some cases, I see DP, when they've been together 3 months or 6 months. That's a very short time to call someone your partner, when you've never met his family and really don't know them.

I think a lot of this is a small minded and slightly prissy hangover from the days when you had to be married to cohabit, now marriage has declined people use cohabitation as the benchmark of whether someone is a "partner" or not.

The problem with this benchmark is that cohabitation doesn't work for a lot of people these days for many reasons. If you are divorced and have small children cohabiting with someone is likely to be quite a bad idea, certainly if not handled with great care and caution.

Cohabitation diminishes the quality of relationships anyway: it takes all the romance and interest out of a partnership and reduces it to quotidian discussion about whose turn it is to wash up and who can be in to let the broadband engineer in. I don't really understand why this should be seen as some sort of mark of commitment.

There was a thread I remember where someone used ‘OH’, and another poster started asking them why they didn’t class themselves as a whole person. 😅

Lol. Crazy eh. 🤪

I also see SO (significant other)

But if it's significant enough to them that they want to refer to it as a partnership, who are we to contradict them?

Lol..
Colleague A - started seeing a girl in Dec, referred to her as his 'missus' by January , her mother as 'mother in law' - mate, she's your girlfriend ( early 20s) and girlfriends mum.
Colleague B- boyfriend of one year is her 'partner ' they both live at home with parents ( mid 20s)
It's rather like kids who want to be seen as grown-ups.

The Krankees were both.

I mean civil partnership is a legal bond equivalent to marriage where the partners cannot legally call each other husband/wife and instead say ‘partner’.

I can see why those people would be annoyed to have their legal term - describing spouse hood - co-opted by unmarried / not legally partnered people. It forces them to explain further or use the wrong words when boyfriend is a perfectly acceptable word for ‘unmarried male lover’ already.

Boyfriend isn't always easier if you want a gender neutral term though and many people may not want to identify their "un married male lover"

I do think if you are married or in a civil partnership you should say H/W as it can often affect the suggestions/advice offered. Apart from that i think call them what you want -