From Status to Contract: The PC Term is "Partner"

Larry Auster observes that yet another word has been ruined by the sinister modern drive to dehumanize every institution by discussing it in the grayest and least personal terms available:

Partner means, or used to mean, two people engaged together in some shared enterprise, or who are friends and are doing things together as a team. But now "partner" has become the quasi official term for two unmarried people--whether homosexual or heterosexual--who live together. And for the truly politically correct, "partner" is even the obligatory term for married persons, since it would "privilege" heterosexual married couples for them to be referred to as "husband" and "wife" while homosexual couples and unmarried heterosexual couples are deprived of those honored titles. Therefore, in the name of equality, husband and wife must be called partner and partner. And with the spread of homosexual "marriage," this change is working itself into the law as well, as I have pointed out many times.

The shift from "spouse" to "partner" is perfectly emblematic of the social-organizational transition from status to contract. Spousehood is a permanent arrangement, unfree after the initial choice of marriage and spouse. Partnership, by contrast, is a fluid arrangement -- fluid by virtue of its meaninglessness -- adopted when useful and casually flouted when it becomes inconvenient, another restrain imposed unjustly on sovereign and absolute wills. Husband" or "wife" is what you are. "Partner" is what you want to be, for as long as you want to be it, and no longer.

Here, as always, the muddling of language is instrumental.

Comments

[Miles Cristi]

I have a partner in my business. Why? Because it is a voluntary arrangement between two consenting people which can be abandoned at any point; this however is not what marriage is meant to be. When one utters the words ‘til death’ in their marriage vows they are consenting to join together but it is in a different union than a business one. Two people are committing everything they are and will be to each other until their last breath.

In so doing they create their status in that relationship of mutual duty and rights as husband and wife. These roles cannot be switched, abandoned, or ignored. By reducing it to nothing more than ‘partners’ how are we to distinguish ‘partners’ in marriage from ‘partners’ in a business endeavor? I think the point here is; we are not supposed to. It muddles the status of a man and woman, and it blurs their roles.

[CorkyAgain]

"Partner" suggests contract, which in turn suggests that the partnership may justifiably be dissolved when one of the parties violates the terms of that contract. Thus, "partner" suggests divorce.

It also suggests that the relationship is not one of being united as one flesh by God, but instead one between two distinct individuals constantly measuring and critiquing each other to see if they're holding up their ends of the deal. I like to describe this as a relationship ruled by justice rather than love, because love forgives and forgets, but justice puts every transgression on the scales.

When we take our spouses in holy matrimony, we are saying that henceforward we shall treat them as if they were blood relatives -- indeed, when God blesses our union, they in fact become the blood relatives who are *nearest* to us. We might still quarrel, or disapprove of their behavior, but we can no more dissolve our relationship on that account than we can our relationship with our children or our siblings, who also often disappoint or annoy us.

[Ryan]

Also rising is this new trend according to which a man's beloved will be referred to strictly as his current "significant other" (or, for the verbally squeamish, simply his "SO"). For one reason or another, though, neither term seems to have caught on thus far in music or in romantic poetry. I can't imagine why.

[bgc]

From my experience, we use 'partner' for the usual PC reason - so as 'not to hurt people's feelings' nor to make them feel inferior or that their partnership relationship is 'necessarily' un-serious (although most are, not all are).

And as usual, the laudable intention of not hurting people's feelings turns-out to be the thin end of a wedge which first equates, then privileges, the concept of 'partner'.

This is the evaluation system of secular hedonic materialism in action - the immediate, here and now imperative of not making a person feel unhappy, ends-up subverting The Good.