Your question seems genuine and coming from someone in the 'younger' generation it was phrased quite politely and respectfully. Don't worry I won't tell your friends you were polite and respectful of your elders, lol.
I use 'partner' because it best describes the relationship between the man I love and who loves me and myself. We met when we were in our twenties and have been partners for 35 years. I hope you will find a man who will be your partner in all things and the two of you will be happy and grow
"old" together as we have.
A marriage is at some level a legal partnership. There is a legal and binding contract between the parties as in a business partnership. Ask anyone who has been married and then divorced about that contract.
The term partner goes much deeper than a contract. A partner is someone you trust beyond any doubt. A partner is someone who always has your best interests at heart. As in an old western movie partners ride together, eat together, fight together and best of all sleep together
In our relationship we are equals in every way. What is mine is his and what is his is mine.
We do not consider each other as a 'husband' or a 'wife'. Those words don't describe our relationship at all. In a str8 marriage the man is the husband. The origin of that word means 'Head of household' more or less:
Husbands and wives are marital 'partners' too.
It doesn't matter to me what others call their partner as long as they do it until they grow old together.
I'm very greatful to Sniffit for reminding me (and everybody else) that there's a particularly American take on the notion of
partner that differs in important ways from the European perspective on a romanticly engaged couple, weather married or to-be-married-sooner-or-later.
I found the first articulation of this central difference reading some 20 years ago Leslie Fiedler's spectacular 500+ pages essey of literary criticism
Love and Death in the American Novel published in 1960 and in many later editions.
Well what is the
European 19th century novel centrally about? It's a story about a mans striving to meet a woman and get married, and all the problems that can befuddle the journey; an important version is of course the novels and plays about all the befuddling that can happen when the couple already are married.
But the fundamental symbolic structure in 19th century European literary culture is this: Heterosexual marriage, problems before and/or after.
In
American 19th century literature you find something very different! You find this voice:
"- Git up on the raft agin, Huck honey!" It's the voice of Nigger Joe shouting out to Huck Finn when Huck has fallen off the raft into the mighty Mississippi.
It's the voice shouting out from Mark Twain's novel
Huckleberry Finn with a vision of what the good life is. The good life, life as it should be, the kind of living we truly want to live, what ancient philosopher's called
eu zen (in greek) or
De beata vita (in latin)...
According to Mark Twain and the American tradition, it's the life two young boys - one of them black, the other white - live on a raft on the Mississippi, fishing to get some juicy fresh food to cook to night, chewing on some leaves of grass and the one using the others sweet butt as a cushion for his head.
So in Huckleberry Finn the partners are Huck and Joe, in James Fennimore Coopers series of novels it's Natty Bumppo and Chingasgook, and in Herman Melville's
Moby Dick it's Ishmael and Queequeg.
In Owen Wister's
The Virginian 1902 novel - the first real western novel - it's the virginian and his partner who is the narrative voice telling the story, but this is also the book preparing for the heteronormalization of western tradition, and American popular and litarary culture in general.
Of course I'll have to end this post by quoting Whitman's "We two boys together clinging":
We two boys together clinging,
One the other never leaving,
Up and down the roads going, North and South excursions making,
Power enjoying, elbows stretching, fingers clutching,
Arm'd and fearless, eating, drinking, sleeping, loving.
No law less then ourselves owning, sailing, soldiering, thieving,
threatening,
Misers, menials, priasts alarming, air breathing, water drinking, on
the turf of the sea beach dancing,
Cities wrenching, ease scorning, statutes mocking, feebleness chasing,
Fulfilling our foray.
