I want a term for "girlfriend"/"boyfriend" but that specifically implies that people are courting, rather than dating indefinitely 🤔 ...ie someone who is on track to soon become either fiancée or ex ideas??
Looking for a word for partners who are courting, not dating indefinitely
17 tweets · April 2024 · 827 likes · 23 retweets · read on Twitter
I noticed this while making a few edits to this post, which opens "In which I answer 6 questions from a friend about". That friend is now my wife, and we were courting at the time. I considered editing it to "girlfriend" but it didn't really feel right. malcolmocean.com/2022/08/nntd-q…
"the woman I'm courting" is a little long but pretty much fully accurate and depending on how you want to play the gender roles, the converse could either be "the man I'm courting" or "the man who's courting me" (or "a", if your courtship process is non-exclusive)
while we're at it, here's a sneak preview of a course I'm running next month on deeply listening to yourself throughout the courtship process so you can confidently commit or quit: mating.nonnaivetrust.dance
"partner track", created by @SanjayNadaraja in collaboration with @jtbooth1021 who suggested prefixing "tenure track" "wife-track girlfriend"? 🤭
@SanjayNadaraja @jtbooth1021 @ScarletAstrorum suggests simply "fiancé(e)":
I don't quite think that works, but if it did it would work best if you followed Tabby's progression here where you go from talking to (privately?) engaged altho wait but if it's private you still can't say fiancée 🙃
"seeing" is one of the closer ones practically speaking. there isn't quite a noun form but that's okay. (seer & see-ee? lol) I could imagine changing the "a friend" in my blog post to "the woman I'm seeing" and that would feel basically right
interesting. "talking" feels to me like zoomer slang for a teenage situationship where nobody really knows where they stand—not at all serious (I've barely heard people use it, to be clear)
well and here's the real issue tbh or from another angle: some people want to maintain ambiguity and they'll mess with clear distinctions
> "no one dates indefinitely" I did for years, and I see lots of people doing this (without even really realizing they are) and it's why I'm in this thread trying to untangle the terminology in the first place! twitter.com/JosephFrogman/…
a good point about using "courting" in a sense it is a stage but it's a stage defined by its direction rather than its location
anyway! I have now officially launched my courtship course, so if you resonate with the sense of wanting to shift your sense of relationship from "boyfriend"/"girlfriend" towards "person I'm courting" (whatever you call it) then check it out:
some suggestions from my wife: since twitter now truncates even <280-char quoted tweets, here's the last bit: > I also like lover, beloved, my love etc for this stage, bc it emphasises the romance of the relationship without specifying the contract
I find it fascinating how people end up with a sense of words having exactly the opposite connotations! (also when they assume their meanings are universal. my guess is that a lot of this is subcultural stuff, eg how adjacent to queer contexts where partner~=spouse)
pair-bonding prospect 🤔
wait hahahahaha this whole time I've been going on about mating dances and didn't notice that this sort of defines exactly the term I was looking for