Language and Relationships in the U.S.A. Circa 2009

This post - http://www.good.is/?p=15549 - on GOOD got me thinking about language and our wide range of informal to formal relationship categories. This was already on my mind last week due to a friend who landed in the "Um-Friend" box in her current relationship and was quite irked, but reading this article brought it to the forefront since I think the article is missing a great number of relevant terms. To discuss just a few -

Partner is mentioned as one option for someone in a relationship, but this term has a context of longer-term connectivity that the article breezily omits.

It misses an entire category of verb constructs for relationships as well:
- My "date" is a one-time thing, but "we're dating" is a good way to say "we hang out and are thinking about getting more serious."
- "We're hooking up" is a good way to say "we hang out and have sex and so what about the rest."
- "We're seeing each other" means we're dating pretty often and will probably keep doing so for a while, but there aren't any plans specified at all about future developments.
We may not be secure enough to be nouns yet, but with any verbing we're pretty sure we're happy about what we're doing.

The article also misses some terms that are used to avoid the entire point of the question:
For instance, "my friend" is nice and noncommittal about pretty much everything, oh look at the pretty daisies. However, this kind of noncommittal response can have a real impact on the future direction of the relationship.

One of the worst examples of the noncommittal response, or at least most dangerous to a fledgling relationship, is "Um-friend." As in "She's my um... friend." When said to a third party about the relationship, it's clear where you're at and where you aren't, at least not yet. When said to a third party about the relationship in front of the Um-friend, however, it becomes clear that you're not even secure enough about things yet to verb the business and say "we're dating." Thereby the Um-friend becomes aware that they should not be secure even in the idea that you might show up for the next Um-date, and come to think of it, why are they even making another Um-date with you anyway?

Heaven help you if you ever utter something like "Um-wife" or "Um-husband."
"Honey, what was that hesitation?"

For those situations where someone might be significant and is probably something other than the "Showing up in a Tag-Team for any Major Event Other" you'd normally assume from the phrase, I like to cheerfully use the term "significant something-or-other." Yes, they matter, and can be much more secure than the Um-friend, but we're not sure yet where the relationship is going from here and we might as well ride the ferris wheel while we're here.

I must admit to an absolute lack of fondness for "my mate" as a description for anyone up to and including my husband, since there seems to be a connotation there that this is the monkey I'm having baby monkeys with, and while that's all nice and good, it has nothing whatsoever to do with the mental, emotional and physical support we give one another day in and day out.  Independent is good. I'm independent. I'm also selectively dependent on someone I can trust to sleep in the same bed for the rest of my life without smothering me when I snore. "My spouse" I think is a better term for a generic husband-or-wife, as it allows for a wider range of implied bonding, but it is definitely a tepid term. I don't think that's a negative for me, as I've never felt a need to rub off my lurid magenta range of infatuation on a third party when describing my spouse in the first place, but it definitely has some undertones - it's the sterilized clinical term.

It is unclear to me why I would use the terms "my snookums," "my sweetie," "my boo" or anything remotely similar to a third party to describe my spouse in any case since presumably the purpose of any conversation where I would describe said spouse would be to clarify things, not to leave them in a state of muddled melted cotton candy goo with no measuring point for the relationship itself. "My lady" is romantic, but syrup-doused, and having anyone refer to me in this manner while wearing anything other than Victorian garb sets off brazen alarums indicating a person who spends enough time in alternate-timeline re-enactments (either physically or merely mentally) to be slightly divorced from the real world.

I don't believe there needs to be much more comment on the use of the term "Soulmate" from the article, except to point out that anyone who uses the term soulmate within one week of meeting another person is best subjected to a preemptive restraining order.