Within a year of dating, 31-year-old Siara Rouzer crossed a major relationship milestone. The guy she was seeing was no longer a boyfriend but her partner. Rouzer said the title change was more than semantics to them. It symbolized their equal commitment to building a life together.
People in the LGBTQ2S+ community often use the word partner to describe their relationship to other parties. While heterosexual couples in the U.K. and elsewhere have used it for years, experts have noticed more long-term heterosexual couples in the U.S. adopting the gender-neutral term as well.
“I rarely hear somebody say, ‘This is my husband or my wife or my girlfriend,’ it’s already becoming more normalized to say partner,” said Dr. Patricia S. Dixon, a psychologist and professor at National Louis University in Florida. Millennials and Gen Zers on social media use it as a show of support for inclusivity and to normalize …