Boyfriend or Partner? Relationship or Dating?

[VelmaD]

Just interesting in the general consensus - when does a boyfriend become a partner? When you've been together a certain amount of time? When you're living together?

And when do you become "in a relationship" as opposed to dating? (not two weeks such as certain FB friends, but whole other story there!)

I've been with boyfriend six months. We are in a relationship, not dating - we do family things, he's my first in an emergency (and vice versa) we are a couple. But I would never describe him as partner (even as DP on here) and corrected someone in real life when they referred to him as it last week (they said your partner, I said "oh you mean my boyfriend" style correction nothing major)

I also saw this touched on on a previous thread - so what's the MN consensus?

It's people trying to get more "serious" without actually getting married. They think by saying partner it gives their relationship more credibility

What a load of shit.

How your relationship is, is what makes it credible or not. Not what you 'call' it.

yeah my pet hate is when people refer to their boyfriends mum as their mother in law. she's not your mother in law, she's your boyfriends mum.

Ok, I feel better now

Partner as a term is horrible. I am girlfriend only, hopefully when I'm too old for that I'll be a wife again! ;)

I call a percentage of my family the 'outlaws'. The parents, brother, brother's wife etc of DS' father.
I'm not in a couple-relationship with my DS' other parent, but we do spend family time together.

I appreciate the terminology gets tricky, but that's partly because there's this lingering idea that the only relationships which matter are heteromonogamous ones which start young and last till death or at least marriage, so there's not much vocabulary for, you know, the way people actually live.

As to when an individual relationship moves from casual to committed, that's up to the individuals concerned, and the only correct answer is 'after having discussed it with each other'.