Talk:Significant other

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[edit] Comments

Studying what people have been writing at Talk:Boyfriend and Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Sweetheart, I've been wondering if this is a good article for boyfriend and/or girlfriend to re-direct to. Any opinions?? 66.245.64.202 21:41, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)

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Content from significant others, now redirected here. Charles Matthews 07:40, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)

"Significant other" refers to one's partner in a romantic relationship. It is a gender/sex neutral term, and often thought of as PC for boyfriend or girlfriend,but can also be applied to legally recognized married spouses(husbands or wives). The "significance" is an indicator of importance in the partner's life, but also signifies the romantic or sexual bond, while explicitly failing to indicate the sexual orientation. With the development of homosexuality and non-traditional sexuality and relationships and the heated political and ethical issues surrounding them, the community of liberal or left-of-center have begun to refer to their romances using this neutral terminology in order to be sensitive to the concerns of discrimination against non-traditional relationships. This term fails to differentiate the variety of human romantic relations, thus reflecting the position that each of these variations is equally legitamite and fundamentally the same.

[edit] Origin of the term "significant other"

In this article, Harry Stack Sullivan is credited with coining the term significant other in 1953. However, he died in 1949. Gilliamjf 08:10, 5 March 2006 (UTC)

It's in a posthumously published work, as the article clearly states. — Graf Bobby 16:30, 6 April 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, but this is completely irrelevant. The "posthumously published work" is correct, but it wasn't by Sullivan. The phrase was coined (or at least popularised) by George Herbert Mead, who died in 1931, in his posthumous book "Mind, Self and Society" from 1934. I always felt that "significant other" in the meaning described in the article was initially (and maybe still is) as a tongue-in-cheek reference to that. The fact that some people use it without any sense of irony doesn't speak against it. Jimmy Fleischer (talk) 20:22, 23 February 2008 (UTC)