I just saw one of those celebrity pop-ups that said “Billie Eilish Goes Instagram Official With New Spouse” and I thought “Isn’t she really young to be getting married?”
So I clicked on the link and I found that Eilish did not get married. She announced on Instagram that she has a new boyfriend.
Obviously, these pop ups I designed to get people to click on them. And it worked.
Or am I the clueless one here? If somebody says they have a spouse, I assume they are married. Has the meaning changed? Do people now use the word spouse to refer to their boyfriend or girlfriend?
I’m a nearly 60 year old white guy, so I’m probably not the best person to ask about what new hip lingo the youngsters are using these days. But my old guy understanding is that millennials tend to refer to their boyfriend or girlfriend using the gender-neutral term “partner” instead of the traditional “boyfriend” or “girlfriend”.
The term “partner” used to be a way to refer to your spouse that also happened to cover non-traditional marriages (gay, lesbian, etc). I have seen many straight couples also use the term “partner” to refer to their spouse so it is no longer just an LGBTQ+ term.
Maybe the article’s original author wrote “partner” and an editor assumed the older meaning and changed it to “spouse”?
I am not young, and maybe young people are using the word differently now, but unless Eilish’s Instagram post actually included the word “spouse,” I’d ascribe this to clickbait on the part of whoever wrote that piece, trying to achieve the exact reaction that they got from you: “She got married? I gotta read this!”
I’ve never heard a person (young or old) use the word “spouse” for anything other than referring to a marital partner.
When I googled “Billie Eilish new spouse,” I got all sorts of celebrity new sites from today, using the words like “boyfriend” and “partner”; four pages into the search results, I don’t see one mention of “spouse.”
Also, googling various versions of “young people using spouse to refer to partner” also gets no hits that suggest that people are using the former word to refer to the latter.
Ever since Facebook started allowing people to add personal status to their profiles, the young folks started using “married to” to mean all kinds of idiosyncratic things.
“What do you mean by putting your status in Facebook to say you are married to your principal? Do I need to have a talk with the police?”
“Mooooommmm … you just don’t understand these things.”
There so many different kinds of relationships these days and sometimes it’s just easier to use a blanket term.
Based on the articles I found when I was googling about whether “spouse” was being used differently now, it seems like “partner” is increasingly being used as that blanket term.
Well, sure, that’s a given, but every individual writer or speaker can make es own words choices. And one okay make one choice at one time and another choice at another. Language is not a science.
Having opened this thread, I felt obligated to go back and do some research.
It did not. Eilish posted some pictures on Halloween. One of them showed her and Jesse Rutherford in costume together. This apparently is an announcement that they are now in a relationship. Eilish did not say anything about the relationship directly; her comment was “life is craaaaaaaaaaaaaaazy:clown_face: happy halloween:jack_o_lantern:”.
They have apparently previously been seen in public kissing and holding hands but these pictures were posted by third parties. This apparently is the first time Eilish has posted a picture of them together as a couple.
On a related note, the picture of them in costume together showed Eilish dressed as a young child and Rutherford dressed as an old man. This is a comment of their age difference; Eilish is 20 and Rutherford is 31.
eta: There were three emojis in Eilish’s post, which I quoted. All three showed up in the preview but only one of them showed up in my post.
I know a number of people who are anti-marriage (for various reasons), and have all the characteristics of a marriage (bought property together, children together) but do not have, or want, a marriage certificate.
Partner has the advantage of being gender neutral - it’s basically the +1 of society.
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