On the one hand, labels clearly matter. On the other hand, something is what it is whether we name it or not.

TL;DR: You may already be my partner.

Modified: 2024-09-28 to update some pronouns.

The Productive Power of Labels

Words create.

Humans know this on a deep level.

Every culture on Earth has some mythos of magical incantations: words creating and effecting just by being uttered.

The Book of John opens declaring that words are the Supreme Creator: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

Hamlet said, “there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Landmark Forum and many other self-help frameworks teach the transformative power of words: Change your language; change your life.

It Is What It Is

Juliet was onto something though when she said, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

Buddhist teaching and the theory of Platonic forms and much other philosophy recognizes that there is a distinction between the words we use and the thing we mean by them. Something has its Buddha-nature independent of language or reference. Circles have a reality independent of their representation.

Saussure’s philosophy/linguistics, if I understand correctly, distinguishes even further than Juliet did. There is the word “rose”, the concept “rose”, and the actuality of a “rose”. Saussure called the word “rose” a Signifier. He called the concept “rose” the Signified.What is an actual, live instance of a rose? To Saussure, that was an ill-formed question. The only question we could possibly answer is about what “rose” means in our heads. Those following Saussure’s work have since begun interpreting actual instances of roses as part of the Signifier. The word “rose” and a live rose in your hand both point you to the same concept “rose” in your mind. If we start calling them “snorkacks”, we shift the Signifier without changing the Signified.

Words In Relationships

What happens to my relationship with you when I start to call you Partner? When I start to say, “I love you.”

On the one hand, it seems ridiculous to think that you are my partner if I won’t admit that you are. On the other hand, if thinking of you as Partner is what makes it true, then what whim bumped me into thinking that?

Words definitely create a marriage:

  • “Declare your intentions before God and friends,”
  • Marriage vows,
  • “I now pronounce you man and wife,”
  • Marriage certificates, and
  • “The marriage contract.”

On the other hand, people who get married just because of the words and the protections of law that come with those words are definitely the exception rather than the rule.

Asymmetric Labels and Me

All of my thinking on this topic over the last couple of months ran me face-first into a wall this week. Someone asked me, “How many partners do you have at the moment?”

In a few threads recently about the distinction between Platonic love and Romantic love, I mentioned how I am getting better at feeling Romantic love without feeling the need for it to be reciprocated. Unrequited love need not be painful.

With this paradigm-shifting, it has become a great deal murkier for me to answer a question like, “Is this person your partner?”

Definitely, there are some people whom I consider to be my partner that I am sure if asked, would say, “Yes, Patrick is my partner.” But, I am finding that there are people who, for me, feel like a partner where I have no idea what they would respond if asked, “Is Patrick your partner?”

One, I suspect would reply, “They used to be. Now we are just friends.” Another, I would have expected about the same from except that they, unprompted, said something to me like, “I sorta think of you as a partner, so I usually just say that rather than trying to explain the whole thing.” And, another, I suspect would say, “Wow. I haven’t seen them in decades. I have no clue why they’d still think of me as a partner.”

So, I tried to nail down what my distinctions are. What is it that makes me think of one person as a friend, one person as someone I am in love with, and one person as a partner. My tentative answer/working hypothesis is:

  • a friend is someone I wish to be happy and fulfilled,
  • a love is a friend who I actively wish to make happy and to bask in the glow of their happiness no matter whether I was involved in its formation or not, and
  • a partner is a love who I feel connected to in a forever way and want to actively make sure is cared for now and forever, today and in old age, in sickness and in health.

By this definition, I find that I have at least seven partners. That’s at least two more than I thought I had. ☺️

Of those seven, I feel pretty sure that two, maybe three, of them consider me a partner (by their definition which almost certainly differs greatly from my definition here).This working hypothesis definitely comes from the Buddha-nature side. I have honed in on my Signfied Partner and discovered more Signfiers for that than I expected. At the same time, there could be a productive power in telling these folks that I think of them as a Partner. And, there is definitely a productive power in recognizing that I think of these people as Partner.

So, I’m still on both sides of the fence. Words create. Words signify. I think I’m still using them both ways.