Tag: relationships

Straight people and the word “partner”

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I had a chat with ChatGPT and had it write this post.

In recent years, the use of the word “partner” to describe romantic relationships has become more common. This gender-neutral term can be used to refer to a significant other, spouse, or life partner, regardless of their sexual orientation. It’s a term that promotes inclusivity and respect for all types of relationships. However, there are differing opinions on the use of the word “partner” among straight individuals.

Some people believe that “partner” should only be used by members of the LGBTQ+ community to describe their romantic relationships. This is because the LGBTQ+ community has historically faced discrimination and has often had to find alternative terms to describe their relationships due to the lack of recognition and legal protections. They may feel that using the word “partner” by straight individuals erases the historical significance and cultural appropriation of the term.

However, others argue that language is constantly evolving and that using the word “partner” as a more inclusive and gender-neutral term is a positive step towards creating a more equal and accepting society. The decision to use the word “partner” or not is a personal one, and it’s important to respect different opinions on the matter.

In some cases, straight women in relationships with homophobic men may use the word “partner” in queer spaces to create a sense of ambiguity around their relationship. This could be seen as an attempt to conceal the fact that they are in relationships with men who hold homophobic beliefs and to create the assumption that they could be queer to give their voices more authority in queer spaces than they may really deserve.

However, in this scenario, the use of the word “partner” to conceal one’s heterosexual identity could be perceived as dishonest or misleading. It could also be seen as an attempt to appropriate LGBTQ+ culture and exploit the privileges and safety that come with being perceived as part of that community. It’s important to be transparent and authentic about one’s identity and relationships, and to respect the norms and values of the communities and spaces one participates in.

In conclusion, the use of the word “partner” to describe romantic relationships is a personal decision, and it’s important to respect different opinions on the matter. However, it’s also important to be transparent and authentic about one’s identity and relationships, and to engage in open and honest discussions about the challenges one faces. Additionally, it’s important to acknowledge and reject any form of discrimination or prejudice, including homophobia, and to actively work towards creating a more inclusive and accepting society.

Our Relationship: The Inside Story of Gay Male Couples

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Since same-sex marriage was legalised in 2014, the days of stigma and shame in gay male society have been replaced with those of liberation and tolerance. Emerging is a gay male world free from heteronormativity, self-loathing and internalised homophobia. To find out more about this new world of freedom I met five gay male couples living across the UK to ask about the inside story of their relationships.

Adam and Jeremy, Brighton

Adam and Jeremy have been together for ten years and have been married since they converted their civil partnership to a marriage last year. Living in a small flat in Brighton, most of their free time away from their office jobs is spent watching movies and playing video games.

“We have an active sex life too,” Adam confesses as he sips his fennel tea. “We don’t take drugs or drink alcohol so we can really experience sex to the fullest.” I ask if they have varied roles in the bedroom, or if they have fallen into strict top and bottom roles as many couples do.

“Oh, we don’t do anal!” says Jeremy with clear shock in his voice. “It’s not that we don’t enjoy it,” he clarifies as I lean forward, “it’s just that we’re not those kind of people.”

“Anal sex is fine for people without commitments,” adds Adam. “I tried it three times at uni.”

“Oh yes, you were a real slut,” laughs Jeremy as he picks up another of his homemade fondant fancies. “But I think we’ve both decided just to be more respectable now. We might even want to have children some day so we don’t want to fall into any habits that might affect their impressionable minds.”

“The adoption agency doesn’t view anal sex households too favourably” Adam explains. “So we try to stick to oral with a condom.”

I ask how they keep their sex lives interesting. Adam blushes, but Jeremy seems a little more willing to open up. “It was our anniversary last week,” he says, “and we tried frottage.” I try to press him further, but he tells me quite plainly: “That sort of skin-on-skin fetish isn’t really for us.”

Steve and Pete, Nottingham

I’m chatting to Steve over a protein shake as he waits for his boyfriend Pete – or his “brofriend” as he refers to him – to finish his workout. “I usually finish first,” he tells me “but I do a more intense session. Pete does more reps.” I ask about cardio. “Nah,” Steve responds, “cardio’s for chicks and poofters.”

Steve first met Pete via a popular gay dating app whilst looking for a ‘gym buddy’, though he admits he did not know what Pete looked like until they met in person. “Most of the guys worth meeting don’t show their faces,” he explains. “The ones who do are usually flaming queens and if I was looking to hook up with a chick I wouldn’t be on this app.”

I ask Steve – who doesn’t refer to himself as gay – if people ever think his statements are homophobic. “Nah mate,” he tells me, “it’s just how it is. I’m masc and I’m looking for masc.”

Steve straightens up, pushing out his muscular chest as Pete, a 5′ 11″ block of muscle and veins emerges from the gym. The two men bump fists as Pete approaches and asks “what’s up”, although he’s neither expecting nor receiving a response.

Pete tells me I’m lucky to have the chance to chat to them today – “We usually chill out in the locker room after a workout,” he says. “Yeah, we normally chill,” adds Steve. I enquire about the nature of their chill out sessions; Pete tells me about ‘brojobs’ – how he refers to oral sex. “Steve’s my bro,” he explains. “Most guys want a wife or something, but I’m looking for men who are men.”

“I’m a bottom,” he goes on, “but it’s all about muscle control. I’m masc so I’m not interested in sissy boys. Men should be men.”

“Yeah, cheers bro,” says Steve, with a nod before he downs the rest of his protein shake.

Mark and Richard, York

Mark and Richard from York are currently planning their wedding. They tell me they decided against a civil partnership, choosing to wait until same-sex marriage was legalised before forming their union. “We’re the same as straight people,” Mark tells me, “so why would we choose anything different?”

Richard nods as he turns the pages of the catalogue in front of him. “I have to pick a suit for the wedding, but they’re all pretty much the same” he says. “I reckon I’ll just let Mark decide.”

“What are men like?” Mark chuckles, standing up and clearing away the coffee cups. I ask if he wants any help. “No,” he says, “I’m going to be a housewife so I may as well act like one!”

“I’m the man of the house,” Richard tells me. “I wear the trousers.”

I join Mark in the kitchen and ask about the dynamics of their relationship. “It’s hard being the woman,” he says “but Richard does help around the house. Any time anything needs fixing he sees to it.”

I ask Mark if he really sees himself as a woman. He tells me it’s more of a mindset than a gender. “Every relationship needs a man and a woman. Just because we’re both men doesn’t mean that one of us isn’t the woman.”

Chris and Johnny, London

I meet Chris and Johnny at a vegetarian restaurant in central London. They arrive together; Chris is wearing black skinny jeans, a tee shirt with a slogan, black Converse sneakers and black-rimmed glasses, while Johnny wears a tee shirt with a print of a video game character, dark blue skinny jeans, grey Converse sneakers and brown-rimmed, circular spectacles. “I don’t need glasses to see,” Johnny says. “I just like the look”.

We’re sitting at a table outside, and after ordering starters – Chris and Johnny both order the butternut tart – they each take out their packet of Marlboro Lights and absentmindedly offer the other a cigarette.

“It’s how we met,” laughs Chris, running his fingers through his hair. “We were in a club before the smoking ban; I was out of cigarettes but I saw Johnny and figured he looked like someone who smoked Marlboro Lights.” It turns out that that was the case.

I ask how long they have been together. “Nine years.” Johnny tells me as he brushes his hair to the side with his fingers. “We moved in together five years ago. We had to get rid of so much stuff though because we basically had two of everything.”

We’re interrupted by the sound of Coldplay’s Speed of Sound. Chris and Johnny both take out their rose gold iPhone 6’s – Johnny answers his while Chris just chuckles. “Yeah, we have the same ringtone,” he tells me. “We didn’t even realise at first but I guess our tastes just align!”

While he has his phone out Chris takes the opportunity to show me some photos of himself and Johnny. I notice they have less facial hair in the photos from last year than the neatly groomed stubble they are sporting today. “Yes, we like to change things up a bit,” he explains. “It gets dull if we keep things the same all the time.”

Dan and Justin, Durham

Dan and Justin (not their real names) have lived together in their two-bedroom flat in Durham for just over a year. I’m meeting them at the flat, and after I’ve been waiting several minutes, Dan answers the door. “Oh thank god!” he exclaims.

He takes me through to their living room, shouting “don’t worry about unmaking the beds!” as we walk down the hall.

I’m confused, but Justin joins us after a minute or so and explains. “It’s in case my mum comes round,” he tells me. “She doesn’t know about us, so we make it look like both beds have been slept in.”

I’m shown around their rather large flat, including both bedrooms. They share a bed, but I ask which bedroom they pretend belongs to which of them. “It depends whose mum is round,” Dan says, and they both laugh nervously.

The flat feels strangely un-lived in – there are no signs of personality anywhere. No photos of the occupants, not even art or posters on the walls. I notice separate CD and DVD collections. “We really have to make it look like we’re just flatmates,” Justin says. “We even have separate cupboards in the kitchen.”

I ask if they think their families have any suspicions that they are a couple. “I don’t know” is Justin’s response. Dan says “I hope not. They’d probably be cool with it, but I just don’t want to tell them.”

John Avocado mainly tweets at @SuperCroup, often posts photos on Instagram and occasionally shoves posts on this here blog.

The language of love

SuperCroup7 Comments

There’s a guy in my life. We sit next to each other and watch TV. We share a house, share a bed. We share some of our money. We’re invited to parties together. Sometimes we fuck.  We report each other’s incomes on our tax returns. We reported every last detail of our relationship to the Department of Immigration and Citizenship so that I could come and live here.

But I don’t know what to call him.

It’s a strange thing, not having a go-to word for that person; I think it comes from a few places:

Heteronormativity means that unless I make it explicitly clear, most of society will assume that the person I’m talking about is a woman. Sometimes this will be because, well, society just assumes people are straight, but bizarrely this will often be out of some strange, misguided ‘politeness’ where, based on gay stereotypes, they’ll assume I’m gay but pretend to assume my [whatever we want to call them] is a woman so as not to offend me.

(To be clear: this offends me.)

Internalised homophobia contributes to this dilemma in a huge way too. And it is, in a way, working with heteronormativity but in the opposite direction. Not always, but sometimes, I feel the desire to hide, and to keep the gender of him as ambiguous as possible. It’s absurd, and as I’ve discussed before I’m very much “out”, and it is a very rare thing that I feel a need to actually hide my sexual orientation out of fears for personal safety etc.

Put these two things together, and combine them with a desire for honesty as well as warmth, and I’m left with essentially zero good choices for what that guy actually is.

Partner is the one people like to use to sound inoffensive, and whilst it doesn’t necessarily offend me, it does make me want to vomit. It’s so sterile and bland, makes our relationship sound like a business arrangement, transactional. It is totally unrepresentative of a relationship based on love and mutual admiration.

Lover. Fuck off.

Spouse crops up on forms and official documents. The Immigration Department uses spouse and I don’t like it at all. Partly because it’s incorrect (yes, de facto spouse is correct I suppose, Border Force), but we’re not married, we have decided not to get married, and we don’t like the idea of marriage. Our relationship looks a little bit like a marriage, at least from the outside, but that is certainly not what it is. (I also really dislike the word, aesthetically.)

Husband is a word I sometimes use to piss people off, but mostly I don’t like it. Again, it’s too marriagey for my taste, and if I’m honest it makes me feel subordinate.

I sometimes use Other Half but I don’t like it all that much. It implies that people are not complete unless they’re in a relationship (and note the “half” – it could never be “he’s one of my other thirds”, which is another reason – even though I personally am not polyamorous – I dislike it). It’s slightly better than Better Half though, which makes me see red.

Related is Significant Other, which I suppose isn’t too bad, but it feels a bit glib. He’s more than just “significant”, but like other half, I feel it does downplay the significance of myself in my own life.

I used to dislike Boyfriend intensely. It seemed okay for young people, or people who hadn’t been in the relationship for a very long time, but for a co-habiting couple in a stable, long-term relationship, it always sounded a little immature. My feelings on that have changed a little now. Using boyfriend feels like a rejection of societal norms. It feels like an acknowledgement that marriage is not some ideal or a goal to aim for. And I like that it pisses some people off or confuses them (as I’ve said before, I’m over caring whether people are confused or not).

Still I don’t call him my boyfriend nearly as often as I’d like. Maybe it’s a feeling that I ought to hide something about him, maybe it’s a desire to be taken seriously. It’s all indicative of an urgent need to unlearn all this rubbish that surrounds relationships and society’s ideals when it comes to talking about them. But I’m working on it.

I’d be interested to know what words you like, dislike, use and avoid. Let me know in the comments or in a tweet!

How we value friendship, and how Facebook has changed that

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I think quite a lot about friendship. I moved halfway across the world when I was in my late 20s (which, I hasten to add, was not that long ago!) to set up home with my boyfriend. It’s a stable, monogamous relationship, but the consequence of that is that it’s fairly challenging to meet new friends – and I mean friends in the sense of genuine friendship, rather than just people I know. So I really love living in the time of Twitter and Facebook, meeting people online and making real, genuine connections with people.

Having the majority of my friends being “online” friends often leaves me thinking about friends I have had in the past. People who I became friends with by meeting them in real life (IRL*), but people I’ve lost contact with. I’ve had the most wonderful friendships with people – and had experiences that made me think “we’ll be friends forever”. Almost all of these friendships have ended because of circumstance. I moved away, or they moved away, or one or the other of us changed jobs, or we just happened to meet at a convention and spent the whole weekend together, but the convention ended and so did the friendship. Some I have as Facebook friends, but the majority of those friends have simply passed into memory.

I get a little frustrated how the internet – and Facebook in particular – has messed with the way people maintain friendships. And importantly, the way friendships end.

Something that I think is hard to accept is the idea that all friendships are temporary – but it’s an important idea that I agree with. Too often I think we measure the success of  a relationship or friendship by it not ending, and we value friendships based on how long the lasted, but I reject this. I say we should value a friendship based on how much we enjoyed the experience while it lasted.

Facebook (and social media in general, but for me it’s mainly Facebook) is ruining this because now we have the ability to add friends to a database and access them whenever we like. We now have this idea that a friend isn’t really a true friend unless we are connected with them for life. It’s for this reason I’m very unsure about Facebook, and maintaining Facebook friendships. I feel that some – maybe most – friendships are meant to me temporary: that it’s not the longevity of the friendship that counts, but the feeling of having a friend.

I look at my friends list on Facebook (it’s small, just 74 names), but also think about the friends I have had IRL in the past who are not on that list, people who I had terribly good – albeit temporary – friendships with. While I love that Facebook and the internet allows us to stay in touch with people we’d like to, when we fall out of touch with people it’s not because we were not good friends, it’s because real friendship and what Facebook would have us believe is friendship are two different things.

* as it happens, I do count the friendships I have with people I only know online as “real life” friendships too, but online vs IRL seems to be a distinction we make, so I use it here for ease of understanding.