Of Werewolves and German Lovers

Patrick is not my boyfriend. He is this great, new person in my life but I am not in any rush to define what we are, now or ever. My friends don’t understand this. “Oh, but he is!” they say. Or “Whatever, don’t even try to deny it.” Really, guys, he’s not my boyfriend. He and I have had entire conversations about how he is not my boyfriend. In fact, if one more person who ought to know better calls him my boyfriend again, I might just have to get a t-shirt that reads “Please remove your label from my relationship.” Because to me, Patrick is Patrick and I’m not really interested in labeling him otherwise.

The problem with “boyfriend” is it suggests some natural progression in romance. You go from “boyfriend” to “fiance” to “husband”. You go from “dating” to “a relationship” to “engagement” to “marriage.” If you’ve been involved with someone for years and you have no plans to get married, people get confused. If you’ve been living together for years and you have no plans to get married, people get confused. If you decide to have children together and still don’t get married, people just write you off as “everything that is wrong with damn liberals these days.” Our society is unable to understand relationships beyond linguistic and legal boundaries, and that’s a problem. And then there’s the implication that there’s supposed to be some uniform set of attributes romantic relationships are supposed to share. My best friend Jason sleeps over at his boyfriend’s place every night. I sleep over at Patrick’s place every night. Therefore, he must be my boyfriend. My girlfriends bring their significant others to social events. I brought Patrick to my friend Tara’s birthday brunch. He must be my boyfriend. Except he’s not.

Certainly, our relationship shares some of the attributes of other people’s relationships, but nothing we do is exclusively what boyfriends and girlfriends do. If he weren’t around and Kennedy were in the country, I’d probably just drag her out to events I wanted to attend, but that wouldn’t make her my girlfriend in the romantic/sexual sense. And what about the things Patrick and I do that no one else does? What people forget with labels is that they fail to capture the uniqueness of individual relationships. I can’t be comfortable calling him my “boyfriend” because in my mind, it reduces our time together to a very limited spectrum of activities. This isn’t a condemnation of other people’s relationships. If you want to call your significant other “boyfriend,” “husband,” or “snuggly-poo,” that’s really up to you. Those terms (especially the last) probably carry a different connotation for you than it does for me. In my opinion, “boyfriend” doesn’t do justice to who he is to me. It sounds stagnant and limiting.

This is not just a problem exclusive to romantic relationships. It took months of delving into each other for me to really appreciate my best friends Jason or Kennedy fully, and at the end of it all, “best friend” seems like such an inadequate term. I wish there were some other way I could describe what they mean to me, because platonic labels, too, are limited. I hate that I refer to them as my best friends, simply because those words do not come close to conveying what I actually mean. But even with them, if I say “This is my friend, but also so much more,” people might understand. With Patrick, if I say “This is the person I sleep with, but also so much more,” the immediate response would be, “Is he your boyfriend?”

Part of the trouble is that “boyfriend” connotes exclusivity, and people seem to really like marking their territory (must be the history of imperialism or something). It’s not just “This is the person I fuck and do xyz with.” It’s “This is the only person I fuck and do xyz with.” It’s alarming to others that I’m not boxing Patrick up and calling him mine because forgoing the term “boyfriend” implies that there’s the possibility he might run off with some other girl or something. Okay, so he might. But if he wanted to do that, then labeling him “mine and only mine forever and always” really isn’t going to prevent that from happening. And I’m not exactly Miss Confidence either. I’m full of insecurities — ask anyone who knows me, Patrick included — but I’ve just come to realize that being able to say he’s my boyfriend is not going to resolve any of those issues.

In lieu of other people’s labels, I have better names for him. And he has many for me. They only make sense in the context of us, but isn’t that the way all things should be? Besides, it’s pointless to call him something when he’ll most likely be something else entirely to me in a matter of months. Maybe I’ll fall head over heels for Patrick this summer and get as close to him as I have with Kennedy or Jason. Maybe at some point, I’ll get sick of the cumbersome series of words “the guy I’m seeing.” Or maybe it’ll be him I get sick of during Week 6 of my 13-week European adventure. Maybe the sex will become boring and the dog will become annoying. Even if I decide that perhaps I don’t need him to pick me up from the airport or move me into my dorm come September, I still wouldn’t want to define what we were. Perhaps the biggest problem with the term “boyfriend” is that when you’re not together anymore, that person becomes your “ex.” That’s what they’ll always be from then on. And even though I’ve only known him for a few months, I think he deserves more than to be left with only two options for what he wants to be in my life.