Making it official

‘He’s not my boyfriend’: a hissed reproach across a dinner table, a weary correction at the bus stop, a giggling interjection at a bar. We all know someone who has a boyfriend who isn’t a boyfriend. An audacious commitment-phobe is courting a friend of mine: they’ve been on four holidays this year; he minds her when she’s ill; he takes her to dinner with his parents; he tells her he loves her. Not. A. Boyfriend.

It’s a common enough set-up today, when the landscape of romance is more confusing than ever. Oh, for a stolen kiss at a crossroads dance and a proposal the week after. Sure, you might end up spending your life with an intolerable arsehole — but at least you’d know where you stand. Today, ‘making it official’ is a gruelling ballet of power-plays and attempted mind-reading.

You start off ‘talking’ to someone. This is the low-stakes descriptor that ‘seeing’ used to be, before it became a highly contested and presumptuous minefield of a term. After a while, you may graduate to ‘hanging out’ or ‘hooking up,’ depending on your coyness. At this point, exclusivity is not on the table. Under no circumstances should you admit to ‘catching feelings’.

By the time you’re actually ‘seeing each other’, things are probably pretty serious, but there’s still that all-important comfort blanket of deniability: if everything goes south now, it never really happened. They may fleetingly appear in your Instagram stories, or in a large group shot on your main page, but definitely not in a photo on their own, taken across a restaurant table. Certainly not in a selfie with you in the snow, or in front of a landmark. At this point, pressure from all sides will be beginning to mount; a decision has to be made. Love Island has shown us some great ways to do a ‘girlfriend proposal’: a text treasure hunt, or by spelling ‘B my GF’ in towels. Then you can relax. Until you start having to correct strangers, “Oh, he’s not my husband!” — and so we begin again.