What are we calling each other these days? By that I mean how do unmarried heterosexual couples refer to each other in situations where using the other person’s name is insufficient, given the relationship?
Boyfriend and girlfriend would seem to be the default, but most of the over-50 crowd I know shrinks from giving the impression that they are still in the kind of relationship they had in high school. For a long while, partner felt off-limits because that was how many gay couples referred to each other, and heterosexual people in a committed relationship didn’t want to give the false impression of being gay (not that there’s anything wrong with that!). These days, with gay marriage, partner feels more appropriate. Still, some people feel partner should be reserved for business relationships or tennis doubles. They want a more intimate term.
What about lover? Some women I know claim to like calling their man my lover, but mostly it’s tongue in cheek. Lover emphasizes the sexual to the exclusion of most everything else, and while its naughtiness seems attractive, it’s hard to sustain the term over a long period of commitment. (“In our house, my lover usually does the dishes.”)
Beginning, I think, in the 1970s and 80s, we used significant other, a term that feels oh-so-CIA, mostly to inquire about a person’s status. E.g., “Does he already have a significant other, or should I try flirting with him?” It’s a mouthful, so some clever folks tried abbreviating it to s.o. – but try saying that one about the main person in your life, and you sound as though you’re enamored of a brand of gasoline. (“I’ll get back to you about the opera as soon as I’ve talked to my Esso.”)
About six years into the eight years of our cohabiting before marriage, my now-legal husband started calling me his wife. I waffled a bit, only because if I referred to “my husband” in casual conversation where a friend in the know might be present, she would be apt to gasp and cry, “You two got married? Why didn’t you tell me?” But when we were out of town, I began to find husband a handy term. After all, Merriam-Webster defines husband as “the male partner in a marriage,” and marriage as “an intimate or close union.” (OK, that’s the third definition, but still.)
Now, though, we have Devin Nunes’s memo about the supposed shenanigans over at the FBI, which gives us the term we’ve all been waiting for:
Strzok was reassigned by the Special Counsel’s Office to FBI Human Resources for improper text messages with his mistress, FBI Attorney Lisa Page (no known relation to Carter Page), where they both demonstrated a clear bias against Trump and in favor of Clinton, whom Strzok had also investigated.
His mistress? Oh, please. I’m not sure how or when we abandoned the sense Andrew Marvell intended in “To His Coy Mistress,” but I thought we had traveled a long way. Like lover, mistress implies an almost purely sexual relationship. There’s something in the term that smells not just of adultery (which both parties in question were engaged in) but also of the kept woman. Check Amazon titles with mistress, and you’ll get The Billionaire’s Mistress; The Mistress Manual: The Good Girl’s Guide to Female Dominance; Mistresses: A History of the Other Woman; and plenty of books titled simply The Mistress with images of a full-lipped femme fatale shushing you or a wistful fallen woman looking out over the sea. As the actor Jim Backus put it, “A mistress is something between a master and a mattress.”
Whatever else the Nunes memo does, its use of mistress casts Strzok’s and Page’s relationship in the light of 50 Shades of Gray, as if there’s something inherently cloak-and-dagger about loving while agenting. And if Ms. Page is Mr. Strzok’s mistress, what is he to her? Her master? The term went out with reticules and farthingales, I suspect, in part because there was no way to make it reciprocal.
Perhaps – I’m trying to be generous here — Kashyap Patel, who actually wrote the Nunes memo, used the word ingenuously. Perhaps, given how we’ve all been wondering what to call each other, it was just the first term that popped into his head. But then — the first term? With all the #MeToo discussion in the air, all the anguished babble about how men and women ought to behave toward one another especially when it comes to respect and sexual choice, the first term that you think of to describe the woman with whom Mr. Strzok was consensually and reciprocally involved is mistress?