Sexfriend?

Hello Dreamers

I would like to take a moment this June to point out that the terms boy/girlfriend feel rather antiquated.

Image generated from AI Wix Studio

Alright, what's the problem?

You, me, and the site crawlers know that when someone says boy/girlfriend, they aren't literally talking about a friend who happens to be a boy/girl. The term, in its common parlance, refers to a lover or romantic interest of some description that you have yet to marry.

Such an understanding came from a bygone era. An era where everyone believed that when a man and a woman were in a room by themselves, the devil was the third person in the room, acting as that pervy friend who likes to be the third wheel as they are a voyeur. So if you associate with members of the opposing gender everyone assumed you had to be boning. The idea that anyone could be involved with someone of a different gender platonically, unless their family, was that alien a concept back in the day. Couple this with the belief that homosexuals were those perverts wanting to molest you in closets, and well, there you go.

So if you were speaking of your boy/girlfriend, everyone would assume this was someone you were dating. Even as time, culture, and science marched on, the authoritarian chains of faith started breaking. As subsequential generations build on the knowledge passed onto them, we start to become aware of how relationships work. How LGB aren't predators, and that platonic relationships can form with anyone. We still use boy/girlfriend to describe a type of romantic interest.

There is a noteworthy exception to this: it is common for women to refer to their other women friends as girlfriends. After all, we're all women so you know we aren't having sex with each other. Right? It's not like lesbians exist.

I really think this term needs to be retired, especially when there is no gender-neutral equal, like personfriend? humanfriend? sexfriend?

If you read those and thought "Those sound stupid," that is how I feel about boy/girlfriend.