Love, and semantics

A word about words: I despise the term "significant other" and its flippant abbreviation, SO. It sounds so cold, and also not specific enough: I have lots of people who are significant to me, and what's "other"? Like "The Other"? It just sounds like meaningless lingo. I hate "Partner" almost as much. It sounds calculating, like you've considered your prospects, and your "partner" is the one you're investing in. I like its suggestion of equality, and also its gender-neutrality, but it's still too formal. I have generally referred to James as my "boyfriend," but as we get older I grow weary of that as well. It was fine when I was 18 and he was 22, but we're grown-ups now, and a boyfriend seems like something you have in high school. "Boyfriend" and "girlfriend" don't communicate the depth of our love for each other, not to mention our shared desire to get a puppy.

What I dislike about these phrases is their coldness, their wide use, how impersonal they are. Therefore, I am experimenting with some alternatives. My favourite, by far, is "man friend," because it sounds to me like something divorcees on cruises would have. Recently a friend suggested "Lover" (pronounced "Lovah"), which is good too, plus it tends to make people uncomfortable. "Gentleman caller," with its fake modesty and its Tennessee-Williams-ishness, is good in small doses. My trusty Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus (given to me by the variously described man in question) suggests, also, sweetheart (nice and retro), escort (fun sexual connotations), companion (overtures of Lord of the Rings!), (main) squeeze, steady, swain, and beau. And those are just the good ones. Perhaps I'll alternate between these for awhile, try them on for size.

Interesting: each of these words means something very specific to me, has a million connotations, precious to a native speaker of English. When I took Spanish, we learned one word for "boyfriend," novio. Is that closer to "swain" or closer to "lovah"? I have no way of knowing. In French, the high-school appropriate term was Petit ami (little friend), which I always found deeply weird. My main squeeze is actually larger than most of my other friends. This is the risk of second languages, that they may never mean as much, or vary in such specific ways.

Vladimir Nabokov wrote Lolita in English, and of the process, he writes (in one of my favourite passages of the afterword to that book):

My private tragedy, which cannot, and indeed should not, be anybody's concern, is that I had to abandon my natural idiom, my untrammeled, rich, and infinitely docile Russian tongue for a second-rate brand of English, devoid of any of those apparatuses-- the baffling mirror, the black velvet backdrop, the implied associations and traditions-- which the native illusionist, frac-tails flying, can magically use to transcend the heritage in his own way.

Nabokov is the only one who understands my boyfriend problem, or I should say, my "boyfriend" problem.