I’ve never heard a young person use the word “spouse.”
S’pose it is
That’s surprising. As a more gender-neutral term than husband or wife, I’d have thought it would be preferred among young people.
When DesertWife were married we had a minister – Universal Life Church – and everything but we did not apply for and did not get a license. In the 6+ years we were together before she died, not once were we asked to produce one.
I’m pretty sure being a cis- hetero-couple played a large part in that.
I think it becomes an issue if she died without a will and someone wanted to challenge whether you were really married and thus had a claim on her estate.
Also, it might matter if you had to make medical decisions on her behalf. Maybe the hospital just assumes you are the husband but if someone from her family came and challenged that then you’d have some problems.
I am curious if you filed taxes jointly or if the government would not let that happen?
Do you get Social Security benefits from your deceased wife?
For day-to-day living though…no one cares.
If you were looking to get some benefits based on being married to someone that had died, you’d best believe that you’d have to produce a marriage certificate. I’m fairly sure my mother had to bring her parents’ marriage certificate in order to get my grandmother VA benefits after my grandfather died. I think they were just short of 70 years.
I was about to say. We had to show our marriage certificate to enroll my wife in my medical insurance.
Now I know that the Universal Life Church in some ways isn’t much of a church, but at very least that contrasts with what my mother reports for the Catholic Church. She’s been engaged for many years now, and probably isn’t going to actually get married because of the difficulties surrounding the legalities of civil marriage, and says that the Catholic Church will not marry you if you’re not getting a civil marriage. It just goes to show how much she cares about the teachings of the church; if they’re inconvenient to your lifestyle, you can just ignore them! Sounds a lot like a certain side of the political spectrum these days.
In an update, Eilish has now gone public as being attracted to women. She says she never mentioned this before because she thought it was obvious and everyone already knew.
Well, no, Billie, if you post pictures of you and your boyfriend there are going to be people who will assume you’re heterosexual.
You should Tweet this!
Since Billie Eilish was never married before (and isn’t now), this “spouse” couldn’t possibly be a “new spouse”. The news items all say that this person she’s dated recently is a 31-year-old man named Jesse Rutherford. (Eilish is 20, incidentally.) Various news items mention this couple as getting together and breaking up several times over the past year or so. It’s not clear if they are together at the moment. Eilish has said that she considers herself bisexual (or whatever the currently hip term for it is). It’s not clear if she has any current partner.
Eilish is 21, turning 22 in a week and a half. That’s older news you must be reading.
It was an intentional misuse of the word designed to get your immediate attention, interest, and “click”. My vote for “Worst Garbage News” is something called, “Dog Tube”. At best they grossly mislead people and, at worst, their titles are bold faced lies.
Is that the one that will falsely post that a celebrity has died?
Yep, among any number of other atrocities that might generate interest in their garbage site.
That’s why I get all my news about celebrity deaths from the Death Pool thread.
Exactly. It was just clickbait. That seems to be the best this thread last year came up with, and I agree with you and the others that it’s just a BS use of the word. Even urbandictionary doesn’t really have “unmarried committed partner” as a possible definition, and it has every random definition there is for a word. It does have “spouse” as code for same-sex partner if you’re talking to somebody you don’t want to come out to, and I could see that instead of using a word like “husband” or “wife,” but that’s as close as it gets, and is nowhere near as up-voted as the definition we’re all familiar with, nor does it have as good an upvote:downvote ratio.
Yeah. I copied that from some news item that discussed the fact that, at that point, Eilish was dating Rutherford. It said that she was 20 and he was 31. It must have been approximately a year-old news item.