Vol. 1, Post #24 Bringing Back Boyfriend

I’m going a little retro with this one. My ongoing sex tips for girls* (*girls who are holding on to mid-life by a thread). A modern dating odyssey for Young Olds, AKA, people with readers.

Dear Readers, before I get to this week’s post, I want to take a moment and thank you for all of your lovely emails and messages about last week’s kinda big one, not only because you made my heart sing with so many beautiful words about what I shared with you, but because a lot of YOU shared very personal stories with me. Made me feel so very honored to call you comrades.

Now, back to this week’s business at hand: what we call the people we date.

I used to think I knew. But I’m tired of “partner” and I employed “lover” a lot when I was in my polyamorous period (even though it’s a polarizing word – me, I’m gaga about it), so I think I want to reclaim the word “boyfriend.”

There’s something so warm and fuzzy and cozy about boyfriend. It makes me feel sort of feminine and (is this weird?) petite. Not petite as a person by any stretch of the imagination, but rather, petite as in extra feminine and extra pretty. I’m gonna circle back to that in a few paragraphs.

When my first marriage was over and I was already involved with my now ex-wife, it was early-ish in the whole “partner” trend. There were still any number of people out there in the general population who assumed that when they heard the word “partner” (this was 2005), the two people in that partnered relationship were connected by business, possibly even law partners. For a lot of gay and queer people, having an option of “partner” in lieu of “boyfriend,” or “girlfriend,” or “lover” was a legitimizing one. It also sort of forced good ol’ homophobes to pay more attention, perhaps even to pay more grudging respect, to what was in many communities a more “fringe” part of society (hilarious – gays, queers, and weirdos rule the world, at least my world).

(Sidebar: CAN WE JUST GO WITH MY FLOW SO I CAN STOP USING QUOTATION MARKS? Jesus Fucking Christ, for someone who loves ellipses and quotation marks, these few paragraphs ^^^ are bonkers! I’m stopping – you inevitably get my “tone” here.)

So it felt good, even a tiny bit rebellious, to use the word partner in those seemingly distant decades. I remember when my ex-wife and I switched from the word girlfriend to partner, rolling it around in our mouths, savoring it with pride. There was so much happy movement around acknowledging the LGBTQ community in those days, with maverick states like Massachusetts legalizing same-sex marriage in 2004 and a nationwide ruling that made equal marriage recognition a constitutional right in 2015. My ex-wife and I had an informal beachside ceremony in Provincetown among 30 close friends in 2014. We were breathlessly part of the zeitgeist and it was a truly beautiful day.

(This is the house that Joel Meyerowitz photographed for his Cape Light series — we rented it. It’s up the street from my usual place in Ptown; that’s us on the sandbar on that day as we said I Do and the other people on the beach and in their houses all cheered. Photographer and family friend Gay Block took this.)

When the relationship with my ex-wife ended and I began to date again about a year or so later, I was at first pleasantly amazed to hear the word partner in the context of hetero love – as in, “I’m looking for a partner who has the same dating goals as me” – because in the same way that when you are pregnant and suddenly notice that there are A LOT of pregnant women waddling around or, similar, when you get a puppy and suddenly EVERYONE has a puppy, it seemed that most people had migrated over from girlfriend or boyfriend to partner. Which made sense. We (the Collective We) were in our 40s and other words sounded silly.

In those years after my second marriage (2015-2017), I had one or two relationships of note, in a sea of some mindless dating and just general drifting along, and when I started seeing S. in late 2017, partner was the established term for everyone in love but not married. All good.

The word partner took on a slightly different tone when I started to date B. in early 2021, who was ethically non-monogamous. As we grew closer, other terms into play, and we became Primary Partners, a way that you signify your relationship in polyamory. B. used the term partner for all of his…partners. His secondary partner (who I still love like a sister) was slightly different, in that she used partner, boyfriend, or lover in various ways. And as for me, I called B. my partner and referred to my (now well-known-to-you, Dear Readers) ex as either my Secondary Partner (until he and I were only seeing each other) or, by my FAVORITE other word, Lover.

Oh My Lover...

How I ADORE that word. I know most of you roll your eyes with laughter and immediately call to mind this SNL skit or this one, but to me, the word lover is just full of all the things I love about…love. The word feels great rolling off of your tongue; it’s a word you reserve for specific people in your posse/pussy (sorry); and it does conjure up a certain level of romance, intrigue, and delicious intimacy. While with B., we called the people with whom we had casual fun our lovers, and when I was my ex, either as my secondary partner or my only partner, we enjoyed the word lovers. That’s what we were. We loved (btw, this film still brings me to absolute orgasm and tears).

Then again, as my pal Michelle says, “I love the word lover but it makes most people gag.”

But today….today, I’m in a slightly different headspace, as I’ve been feeling like I’m ready for both a new love, and a new word. Or an old word.

Boyfriend just sounds so…fun. Not less serious, not less sexy, not less anything. But definitely more joyful and sweet. And, to my point above, there is something very “wearing his Varsity Wrestling jacket as you walk down the hall in 7^th grade” about the word boyfriend. I just feel happily enveloped by that word, in a way that both excites me and give me a peaceful sense of calm. Put it this way: not a lot of crazy shit goes down when your boyfriend is around, unless you two are making it happen. Right now – perhaps in this chapter of Young Old life? – that is a big big BIG plus. Like many of you, I’m starting to understand that I can no longer ignore the news cycle, that some serious life-threatening bullshit is more than simmering in our political world, on top of the rest of the global unrest. A boyfriend that I really like seems heaven-sent right now.

And who remembers this??? The 1979 benefit concert that Linda Ronstadt hosted for then-presidential nominee Jerry Brown in which she sang “My Boyfriend’s Back” -- as my 11-year-old self recalls, she also canoodled with him ON HIS LAP for the rest of the performances that I think included supergroups of the time, like The Eagles.

The man I am dating – yes, THAT MAN – he’s definitely Boyfriend material. We are having a great time. He met most of my close friends at a gathering that I had for some out-of-town Chosen Family and lived to tell the tale. My son has been home for a few weeks and they also met and yakked about the music biz; my boyfriend was in artist management (DID YOU JUST CALL HIM YOUR BOYFRIEND, ABBE? I THINK YOU DID) and while AW has zero skin in this game other than my happiness, he (like my besties) has pronounced this man A Really Good Guy.

You know what you call the Really Good Guy that you are dating, who surprises you with kindness and lovely flowers and thoughtful gestures, who can make fun of you to your face with utter adoring sweetness, who tells your friends how much he likes you, who also seems more than game (at this early stage) to get down in bed the way you like?

That, my Dear Readers, is a Boyfriend.