Howdy, partner

Miss Self-Important has a humorous response to my post below. It's clever, but the point she's making seems very slippery-slope CCOA (conservative critiques of academia). Academia, as MSI presents it, is a veritable anything-goes libertine paradise. That's certainly academia as imagined in much of the right's discussion of academia, but I'm not seeing the world of academia I've experienced.

The personal, the political: I met my husband in grad school, and thus have been single, coupled, and married during my course of study thus far. I'm not in a particularly right-wing region or field - quite the contrary. And my friends and acquaintances tend to be in the same region and/or field. It's never once been my sense that there's some kind of widespread knowledge of or earnest respect for the kind of arrangements MSI tongue-in-cheek describes. If your partner (singular) is someone you can legally marry - and if you live in NY, that's the case - your relationship will be treated differently if you are married or not.

The status quo would seem freewheeling, I imagine, from the perspective of someone who views same-sex relationships as inherently decadent. But that's all that's changed, all that's been introduced, in this oh-so-radical new age. It would not be done to bring three dates to a bring-your-life-partner event, or a different date to each one. There's no feeling that this is but the first step of many, and that at next year's holiday party, an incoming first-year may bring a harem. It comes back - alas - to the Charles Murray argument - there's a certain amount of anything-goes-in-theory, but grad students are not living their lives in as interesting ways as all that. There's a difference between what might be discussed in a seminar (not that these are seminars I've been in, given my field) and how things would be treated in life.

The scenario MSI refers to - "in which someone got a spousal hire for a person to whom it turned out she was not (yet?) married" - is probably a case of, these people were engaged, whether in the shiny-ring-as-Facebook-photo sense or in the they-informed-all-relevant-parties-of-their-intentions one. Unless these were two friends, in which case everyone involved would be, I'd imagine, not thrilled. What's weird with the case I linked to before is not simply that the two aren't married, but also that there's no reason to believe they're future-oriented as a couple. The clearest way to indicate that is to, you know, get engaged/married, but there would be other ways of doing so if you can't get married in your locale, if you have principled objections, snowflake objections, etc.

But what about that "'my partner,'" an expression which, according to MSI, "is sufficiently ambiguous and politically-charged that it makes people anxious about looming discrimination claims"? I can speak from personal experience that if you refer to a partner or a spouse, different situations are assumed, and one can remain gender-neutral these days through the use of "spouse." But "partner" is there to acknowledge the existence of grown-up romantic relationships. If you refer to a "boyfriend," and you're post-college, at an age where people can perfectly well be full-on married, you're referring to the guy you've been kinda seeing lately. (There is a gender difference, such that a grown man referring to a "girlfriend" may be understood as not a bachelor, not gay, as having committed and acknowledged a commitment to a woman, and thus be viewed by those with whichever outlook as reassuringly traditional. It doesn't cut both ways, and probably stops applying if the man is over, say, 35.)

"Partner," in my experience, is used as an umbrella term, with most of what's under said umbrella consisting of... marriages, the rest being long-term presumed-monogamous cohabitations that are either on the cusp of becoming marriages or that for the reasons I've mentioned above (legal, principled, snowflake) are sticking around but not spousal. Once same-sex marriage is legal throughout the country, I suspect that "partner" will cease to be an option. Those now prevented from marrying same-sex partners would do so, the big principled objection would be gone, and what would remain would be esoteric principled objections and snowflakiness.

But for the time being, those who could be legally married but are not have a way of describing their situation. On the one hand, it's worth remembering that marriages are treated differently, and that if you want your relationship to get the respect of a marriage, you might want to think of getting married if that's an option for you, or vocalizing your desire to do so if it were. On the other, it's useful, in professional situations, that there's an efficient, generally-recognized way to describe serious relationships that differentiates them from three-month or three-date this-and-that. And while it's fair, I think, to treat relationships differently on the basis of whether a couple that could marry has gone and done so, it's not fair to treat individuals differently on the basis of marital status. The ambiguity of "partner" isn't necessarily a knock against it.