While enjoying a breakfast with my sister and my Ethnic mother the topic of marriage came about. The imagining of marriage, the wedding cake, the dress, and all the above took over our dining room, as my mother’s dream to see each of her daughters be married off came with such warmth. The conversation however took an interesting turn when the topic of significant others came about. At the very moment after I said the words, “personally I wouldn’t mind if the person I marry we call each other partners, and not husband and wife”, things went silent. With the widened eyes of my sister, and the mouth drop of my traditional African mother, one would’ve thought I had said the most bewildering of all words. However, my naive statement came about without much thought to the questioning it may face.
What occurred in my little apartment that Tuesday morning happens a lot in the outside world. The term “partner”, to many, can feel complicated to some perhaps due to its neutrality with regard to gender and marital status. That breakfast morning opened up a concept I wished to explore: social dynamics between marriage and labels.
For so long the term “partner” seemed to be a term reserved to relationships in the LGBTQ+ community. Even still when I hear a married individual call their significant others “partner”, before asking their name I automatically assume they identify as other than heterosexual. To be clear, my appeal to “partner” is to not feel “different” or “revolutionary”. Rather, as I explained to my disbelief African mother, it’s the way I see the term adding context to commitment and having a lifelong best friend. This is something I don’t always feel from the traditional phrase “husband and wife”. The argument would be “partner” and “husband and wife” holds different social dynamics and binding. That being said, a challenge would be that the term “partner” is still not excluded from the binding of social expectations and society’s bearing on them, despite the different extent of social challenges each term may face.
While for some non-hetero marriages the term partner means inclusiveness, and other hetero married couples a personal political statement, or for a percentage of the married population a more cooler title, at the end is it really anyone’s business what you call your spouse?
Dina John