English Language: Are we afraid to label relationships?

Hello Canadian ex-pat living overseas. I have a pretty cosmopolitan group of friends made up of people from different countries. Recently a French friend of mine who is dating a Canadian girl pointed out how we English speakers are really uncomfortable with labels describing our relationships.

For example, he said that in France, when you have kissed a person and go on dates, that person is your boyfriend/girlfriend. However English speakers don't say this until the relationship becomes pretty serious. I myself prefer to use the more ambigious "Seeing each other" when I date someone. If I started to date someone, and they called me their Boyfriend, it would be a little bit strange.

He told me a story how his French friend was dating an American for 3 weeks. After they stopped dating, she got introduced as an Ex-girl friend by another French person. This girl found this really strange.

We have so many coy terms when we are dating someone such as "We're going out", "seeing this person".

My Korean friends said after dating someone for one week, they are your boyfriend/girlfriend. They also will use the word "Love" pretty much as soon as they start dating someone. When I was a Korean girl, someone asked me if I loved her. It was a bit awkward when I had to explain that to say "I love you" is usually a pretty serious moment in a relationship for us English speakers. However we also you use the word "Love" all the time to mean we really like something, as long as it's not a person. For example "I love that movie" or "I love chinese food".

I wonder if it's cultural or if the English language has a tendency to avoid using words to describe relationships. I would be really interested to hear from people who's English as a second language view on this. Also is this only for North America or do Brits do this as well?

Comments

Being Dutch-speaker, I can say that we've got some problems too. The Flemish phrase for "I love you" is "Ik zie je graag" which means "I like seeing you."
 
Very insightful. As a half-korean/half-german-american, I was encouraged to brag about my traditional partners and not say a word to anyone when I was dating outside their very small parameters. I became very reluctant to label my relationships to people after awhile, going with a very vague reply and a quick distraction to steer the topic away. I wasn't keen to hear their opinions while I was busy sorting out my sex life.

Really great entry, glad I spotted it.
 

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