What's in a Name?

Names stand at the frontline of change: sacked capitals, first-born children, uncovered stars, three-winged flies plucked from the air. In few places is this more evident than in the titles we bestow on the people we like and love. From the relatively bland friend suggesting a generic sense of amiability to the more pointed girlfriend or boyfriend which invite gender to the party along with its good friend, romance, to the spectrum of terms that do not indicate people so much as actions: we're together / official/ exclusive / dating / seeing each other / going out / hooking up / hanging out, the vocabulary of human interaction is rich and subtle.

Actually, the vocabulary we use to describe lots of things is rich and subtle. What makes relationship terminology so interesting is that it must serve two very different purposes in a way that other, less personal registers do not.

Two of my dear friends were married this weekend and it was only a few days after the wedding that the question of their new titles came up. Wife? Too June Cleaver. Husband? Too serious. Spouse? Too bureaucratic. Partner? Sort of vague. Beloved? Patently absurd. Although all of these terms may accurately describe a legal or religious status the associations they trigger often fail entirely to capture the specific truth of a given relationship.

After all, they are primarily social roles, heavy with the meanings society has invested in them, while marriages and dates and trysts and passionate love affairs are personal and distinct and would seem to reject easy summary. What could be more unique than the way someone fits into your life? And what could be more romantic than expressing that by rejecting the pre-fab labels used with abandon to describe all the other couples in the world? On the other hand, what could be more annoying than having to explain your attachments over and over again to the uninitiated not familiar with your home-brewed terminology?

The language of relationships is so intensely personal and yet under such pressure to be legible -- to be useful to the public beyond the relationship -- that it will almost always find itself in a compromising position.