Member-only story
Reflections on Identity
I Can’t Call Him My Boyfriend
What to Call a Midlife Date
Last night I went out to dinner to celebrate my friend’s birthday. Well, not my friend exactly, more like the man I’ve been dating for a few years. He calls me his girlfriend and I have gotten used to it, though I remember the first time he introduced me with that title, I looked around me to see who this girlfriend was and why I didn’t know about her.
When I say the word boyfriend, I choke the word out. It sounds foreign on my tongue, like I’m trying to roll my R’s in Spanish or make the guttural sounds in the Hebrew words I say in prayer. It feels like a relic from another time, the time before my last boyfriend became my husband when I was twenty-five, which was twenty-six years ago.
Boyfriends are for fanciful young ladies who dream of happy ever afters. I am neither fanciful nor young, neither a lady nor a believer in happy ever afters. A boyfriend is for the girl who wants a boy to take care of her, to wrap her in his flannel shirt when he sees she is shivering. Who waits for the precious gift of a bracelet his mother has secretly chosen and wrapped for him to give to her. Who wants to be in possession of a boyfriend who validates her worth and to know she is in someone else’s possession too.
