What Do I Call You?
How a shortage of relationship vocabulary shapes and limits what we think is possible.
At a recent gay men’s event I was attempting to describe my relationship with someone in my intimate sphere. It ended up requiring far more words than it should have. It became clear at that moment that we are boxed in to certain relationship definitions by the verbiage we use.
The person in question was someone who I care for deeply and am physically intimate with, but who doesn’t fit into any of the pre-delivered relationship definition boxes. My explanation went something like this:
____ and I are quite close. I’m not a member of his immediate polycule. I revolve around, interact with, and sometimes play with him and others in the polycule. We’re more than friends. Not quite boyfriends. Certainly not partners yet our love in the moment when we’re together feels as strong as any partnering.
I kept blathering, floundering to describe the relationship because there were no readily available simple words that were adequately up to the task.
I’ve always said that words are only an approximation of what it is they’re attempting to describe. That’s always true. But in this case, there were no words to quickly grab off the definition shelf and use in any accurate shorthand way.
When philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, “The limits of my language are the limits of my world,” he was alluding to how words create our reality.
In this quote, Wittgenstein suggests that language is not just a tool for communication but the very framework through which we perceive and understand the world. Our thoughts, ideas, and concepts are all bound by the language we use, and therefore, the scope of what we can think about, describe, and comprehend is limited by the boundaries of our language. If there is something we cannot express in language, it remains outside our grasp, effectively beyond the horizon of our understanding.
This is also true of our perceived relationship options. Words limit us. Words create our relationship reality.
I clearly recall the conversation I had years ago with my boyfriend who is not my partner and not my collared submissive. We consciously chose boyfriend because of its somewhat nebulous definition. We didn’t want to be constrained by a rigid definition.
My partner and I don’t use the word husband because we don’t like how heteronormative it feels to us. Yet when I say partner versus husband I can see in some people’s reactions that they’ve categorized our relationship of 35 years as on a lower rung of the ladder compared to the social gold ring status of husband.
My long-time collared submissive and I have words we use to describe our relationship, some of which trigger others and we find we need to sometimes be careful depending on the audience, and that can be exhausting.
I met a guy recently with whom I hit it off rather quickly and deeply. Apart from a kiss and dancing intimately together at a club, we didn’t do anything physical. Yet the time we spent together felt so connected and bonded that it felt like some sort of relationship. When we referenced our connection during a conversation, I recall saying “whatever this is” to frame it as something more than casual but not within the confines of any word I could think of in the moment.
As someone who is poly and who strongly values the love I have with friends and intimates, I find myself constantly struggling to define all those relationships.
When you begin to research words to describe relationships, you end up discovering lots of adjectives but relatively few nouns. An adjective describes a noun (or pronoun) but can’t stand alone as a descriptor unto itself. So, when you try to describe relationships that don’t fit neatly into the common boxes, you end up stringing together a bunch of adjectives to modify the noun and after a few sentences realize you’ve only come close to describing it.
I wrote about the failure of words to adequately describe my relationships in “How Many Relationships Do I Have?”
That’s a lot of descriptors, and I didn’t list them all. Yes, they’re useful. Common language helps us discuss things using the shortcuts the language communicates so we don’t have to keep defining what we mean all the time. My own balking at these labels isn’t because I don’t value their usefulness. I do. But every time I use one of them I think to myself “Well, that’s close, but it’s not exactly what I mean” when describing my own relationships or sometimes when referencing the relationships of others.
Despite an ever-growing set of words to describe relationships, it’s still a paltry number compared to the vast variety of relationships that exist. Language and the cultures in which it grows and morphs move relatively slowly. Perhaps over time we’ll have far more words to describe a wider array of relationships.
But in the meantime, I think at least being aware of the difficulty in doing so for many of us can prompt us to at least make a valiant attempt to do so with the language we have available to us now. I also think it’s good to be aware that a shortage of relationship vocabulary can shape, and limit, what we think is possible.
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