Quote:
Originally Posted by FingerLakes
Few things make me make a shitty face like cis straight people calling each other "partner." It seems so unnecessary and, as Jesse said, millennials have kinda co-opt'd the term.
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Hold your horses. The usage of "partner" goes back two centuries and was mostly used in a heterosexual context. Certainly, it was used widely by gay couples since the late 70s. But there were straight couples using the term partner since the mid-20th-century too as a response to their view of marriage being patriarchial.
The big picture is that the core belief of what marriage, dating, romance has gone through a major upheaval for everyone. Even the idea of a boyfriend and girlfriend is a 20th-century concept.
One of the interesting things about these definitions is that there was a movement among gay men in the 1970s to throw away marriage because it was viewed as antiquated. It was to the point of a vocal group were against legalizing same-sex marriage because they thought marriage was wrong overall. Then came AIDS which brought to light the need for legal rights for partners.