I like the old standbys like wife, girlfriend, and boyfriend. My wife is also my life partner most of the time but that sounds a little formal.

There's a difference I think in describing your relationships within your circle of friends and to the general poly community. I might call a person my secondary on a forum like this as an accepted and understood term but describe that same person as my dearest friend to those close to me. Use what you want in general but remember specific words for things exist so we can accurately describe what we mean...although, one of the great things about the english language is that it is forever changing and growing.

I call everyone my friend. Except now the kids are old enough to get the gist of it, I use boyfriend and girlfriend around them because that's their vocabulary.

I give them numbers so I take there birthday and add a letter to the end.

So like one would be 8-5-76… “Hello this is my 8576A”.





(yes I am joking)

The reason I don't use primary and secondary language is that I don't want to refer to a relationship based on its relation to another relationship. (Disclaimer: I know that some people don't use P/S/T this way, but it sounds like "this one is first, this one is second" to me, and I can't get away from that in my mind.)

So, if for some reason their name won't do, I just refer to people by whatever they are. There's already lots of language for describing relationship status, and that language works for me. I've had a husband, boyfriends, lovers, partners, fuck buddies, FWBs and a lot of people I just call friends. I can have several of the same type at the same time without numbering them. For instance, "This is my boyfriend Bob, and this is my boyfriend Chris, and this is my boyfriend Steve." And if I have a boyfriend and a husband at the same time, those words already communicate enough about what's going on without adding on any other descriptors.

I use wife, girlfriend, friend or no label at all in real life. I also use the term open relationship over poly generally (most monogamous people don't seem to know what poly and polyamory mean).

In online poly discussion forums I definitely use terminology like NRE, primary, secondary and FWB, but 95% of the people I hang out with in person wouldn't recognize these terms at all. And I'm sure newbies coming here must be confused by the terms as well. I think I'm realizing through these recent discussions that poly terminology is kinda silly, why do we need to say consort or secondary when we could just say girlfriend? Or why say friends with benefits when we could just call someone our friend and not declare to the world we fuck sometimes? Non-poly folks don't recognize most of the terms and poly folks can have vastly different ideas of what they mean (like with secondary). In the past I've thought these terms make conversations easier, but I'm realizing that they often make conversations more cloudy. I'm going to try my best to use normal real world words that have more universally accepted meanings and stop taking shortcuts with the language.

I tend to use the words mate, partner, boy/girlfriend, lover, friend with benefits, and chew toy. I like them because they describe the kind of relationship I am having with the person. A mate is a person that I have a long-term committed relationship with. A partner can describe any romantic/erotic pairing where there is also a strong level of emotional interaction. Boy/girlfriends are people with whom there is a fair degree of commitment, longevity, and involvement, but who are not expected to become life partners. Lover is somebody I care deeply for and have sexual relations with but who is not inextricably tied into my life. FWBs are, well, friends I sleep with but don't try to form a romantic relationship with. Chew toys are nice folks that I may or may not see very often but enjoy having sex with.

One thing I almost never see come up as a plausible theory about why people "need" to use labels is that it can be fun. It seems like it's always framed as a need to satisfy an insecurity, but often I find it entertaining, and many of my friends are also wordsmiths of various stripes. It can be a fun challenge to try to come up with phrases that accurately sum up the emotional content of a particular relationship and existing relationship status while also being playful. Of course a lot of my friends also play around with gender stuff as well, so there seems to be an underlying understanding that words may not mean what they seem to mean.

Anyway, some descriptions I've heard among my pals in the last couple of months:

"She's my new lesbionic lady friend."
"He's her baby daddy. Well, future baby daddy."
"Her female boyfriend"
"That guy I'm going to marry."
"We have a thing with a lower-case t."
"His lesbian girlfriend"

Then there's the "mostly-gay ex-boyfriend" and the "slutty New Jersey ex-boyfriend." I have one friend who says her relationships don't start until they're officially ex's. I guess the theory is once you get the typical relationship stuff out of the way, then you're free to create whatever.

Anybody else use labels because they're fun?