“My friend.” “My cousin.” “My next door neighbor.” “My boss.” don’t imply “ownership.”
Who are rah-rahs?
As I explained above, rah-rahs are the radical religious. People who think it so obvious that their way to religion is the only right way and everyone should see that and follow it. It’s a phrase my sister the radical feminist lesbian came up with, and one I intend to put into general use.
Little aside: I wonder how this would be dealt with in languages, like Russian, where you have two different verbs for “to marry”.
One applies to women (by default implying that she is going to marry a man) and the other to men (again, by default implying that he is going to marry a woman).
<very very stupid joke> Maybe that’s why things are problematic in Russia with respect to homosexuality in society… they find out that they have to completely revamp the very grammar and vocabulary of the language and that is simply too much! </very very stupid joke>
(As an aside, in Russian it is basically impossible to have gender-neutral language. The moment you have a verb in the past, it has to agree in gender with the subject, and it makes it all-but-impossible to hide the gender of the person you are talking about).
Same here. I’ve met the husband of one guy I served with, and I know two women (one also a former shipmate) with wives. They’re happy, I’m happy for them. But it still sounds a little odd… 
Maybe if they weren’t actually married, maybe, but unless it was actively fraudulent, why would I give a shit? There are still reasons a gay couple might use spouse terms without a legal marriage.
I take great pleasure in referring to the woman that I have been committed to for the last 30 years as my wife. I don’t feel like a 2nd class citizen any more. Using the term “partner” or even “spouse” made me feel like I was trying to hide something. I think that adopting accepted terms for married individuals is one more way to move forward with awareness and acceptance.
“Which one of you is the husband?”
Seriously?
Yeah, it’s kind of difficult to imagine someone asking this question in this day and age. The fight continues.
No, doesn’t bother me at all. Never did. However, why would you say “her legally married wife?”
Right, because the figure of speech is “lawfully wedded” wife.
I’m happy to hear it, and if you’re not, that’s your problem, because marriage between any two consenting adults is here to stay. IF you don’t like it, don’t get married to someone of your own gender. It’s as easy as that.
If I see a straight couple together I also dont know what to call them until I know them. He could call her his friend, girlfriend, fiance, or wife. I knew a straight couple who were not actually married but had been together for so long they didnt want to use boyfriend/girlfriend so they said husband/wife.
And then some people dont want to be called anything more than their name.
Now in the case of a gay couple, what if they are not “legally” married but still just want to call each other that or maybe they just had a commitment ceremony?
Ok, now after all that, what do gay couples want to call each other if they divorce? Would a man call another man his ex-husband?
I have a problem with the usage of the word “husband” to mean simply “a male person who is married”. I don’t believe that definition is correct, even if it was legally the same as what I think it means up until 20 years ago. There was apparently a collective decision that the above definition was correct in English now that same-sex marriages are legal, but I see no reason why it necessarily should have been. I think the fact that it freaks out those opposed to the idea is the reason it caught on, just as the reason that gay rights moved towards full marriage when civil partnerships ran into opposition. I personally would rather go with what doesn’t cause people to get upset when there’s a perfectly viable alternative that’s absolutely the same. If gay rights people want to rub it into the rah-rahs’ noses that the majority of the populace is opposed to their way of thinking, I mean, sure, if you want to be an asshole about it, that’s fine with me, because those people kinda deserve to have people be assholes to them. But I’d rather not take the assholish approach when I more conciliatory choice of words exists. And thus I will always use the word “spouse”, which existed before all of this.
No, I’m not saying that you all are assholes for preferring to use the terms when the perfectly reasonable “spouse” exists, because you may have been entirely unaware that there were people that were all for gay rights and same-sex marriage that feel that the words “husband” and “wife” should only refer to members of a heterosexual marriage. And I don’t have anything against other people using them so long as they aren’t trying to rub it into anti-gay-rights people’s noses that they lost, but the latter is an example of a violation of the general rule of “don’t be an asshole”. Because I don’t want to possibly be perceived as doing that, I always will use “spouse”. People think of me as an asshole too easily without me trying to be, so I take steps to make sure that people don’t.
All the dictionaries I look at say husband=married man. You really think they changed that in the last 20 years? What was the definition before? Can’t imagine they felt the need to put “man who is married to a woman”.
Why wouldn’t they?
It’s the definition I was taught in ESL class, but apparently some of you put waaaaaaaay too much thought into it. What else would you want it to mean? And what is that “more strict definition” Novelty Bobble talks about? Are some of you piling up your very-specific, very-narrow concept of “domestic gender roles” on top of what is a very generic word crossing a lot of different cultures with very different domestic roles, and different levels of stricture about them?
Focusing at first on that last line; again, to me, it seems whatever gives them some comfort and feels right to them should be fine with those around them.
Another flaming heterosexual here but -------- my wife and I lived together for 22 years and have been legally married for over 20 years. Our joke is that soon we need to get divorced and come up with a third option. Back in our pre-paperwork days she was anything from my girlfriend to fiance to partner to wife and the order/descriptive could change in the course of the day. My favorite was a couple years where we pronounced PoOSSLQ (person of opposite sex sharing living quarters) as “poss-el-Q”. Yeah – a certain part of me likes to confuse people. Even as a married couple we sometimes use less-than-standard descriptives; its just who we are.
Why should any other couple be different? There are so many things in any relationship that can bring pain; health, family tensions, hundreds of others. If how you describe each other gives you some comfort God bless you for it and do it. I’m not going to have any problems with it.
I don’t understand any of this. So, aside from the fact that ‘husband’ does mean ‘male spouse’, are you saying we have fought all these years for equality, but now we should just shy away from embracing it? Spouse is a genderless generic. I am not genderless, and neither is my beautiful wife.
Well, genderless language doesn’t imply genderless people, but I don’t why it should be mandatory for same-sex couples but not for others.