I've just finish reading (pronounced "wasting time looking at") a rather lengthy (and often tragicly funny), um, web site (if we can call it that: it's actually one huge page with a few small tendrils hanging off it) entitled Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About by one Mil Millington, a British gentlemen. (Though I get the feeling he'd hate being called a "gentleman".)

The narrative involves a woman with whom he has clearly spent more than a decade, sired two boys, and, aside from flights of fancy involving one Alyson Hannigan, seems to be monogamous with. He gives every indication he plans to spend the rest of his life with this woman, apparently continuing a long, involved fight which has to do with plants and cleaning.

It's clear he loves her dearly.

Now, to his American readers, who (of course) constantly ask why he refers to this woman as his "girlfriend":

What is it with you Americans and marriage? You seem to have some kind of confusion that makes a ritual inseparable from the thing it announces. I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but if you don't have a funeral, you're still dead, OK? No, we're never going to get married. And we've spent the money it would have cost us on a loft conversion.

What is it with us Americans???

Look. You've been living over a decade with the same person. You call this person a "girlfriend", from the words "girl", meaning a young lady, and "friend" meaning someone you like to hang out with. Do you normally sire children with your other "friends"? Do you and the guys do the same thing with your new digital camera you do with her? Are you free to make other such "friends"?

No? Then why use the insipid term "girlfriend"?

Look, it's not we Americans who are somehow wacky about this. What's unusual is wanting to spend your life with the same person, raise children and live in a home together, and probably grow old and die together fighting about who didn't clean out the microwave, and attach to that an appelation formerly reserved for teenage crushes.

Throughout time and space, people have recognized that this kind of thing tends to occur where-ever men and women get together. And when people see a particular thing occur, with great regularity, they try to make up words to describe this thing and distinguish it from other things.

In every other society in the world (save a few European exceptions), and through the rest of history, this practice is called "marriage", or some local translation thereof. So much so that even if you don't have the aforementioned ceremony, most societies still recognize it as a "common-law marriage".

This isn't some bizarre thing us awful Americans have done.

(Rather, it is Europe and parts of the UK which are the exception.)

Look again at the argument put forth:

You seem to have some kind of confusion that makes a ritual inseparable from the thing it announces. I'm sorry to be the one to break this to you, but if you don't have a funeral, you're still dead, OK?

Yes, my friend, but we have different words for dead people. We add the appelation "former" and say words like "departed" and "survived by" and speak in the past tense. When "the thing" occurs, we certainly acknowledge that in our daily actions -- say, we stop inviting the deceased over for dinner -- but we also recognize that by modifying our language.

In Mil's analogy "living" is apparently being single and on-the-market, and "dead" is apparently being terminally committed to that one person. "The thing" dividing them is the mutual acknowledgement of an ongoing, long-term commitment.

Clearly both Mil's actions and the even the phrasing of his argument itself admits "the thing" has occurred. Yet Mil refers to Maragaret as "his girlfriend", as though "the thing" has not occurred, though his actions -- bless 'em -- are every bit to the contrary.

The ceremony is beside the point. The point is that it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, eats bits of bread like a duck, and even flies south for the winter, and yet there are people in Europe (and here, too) who seem bound and determined to keep calling it an egg.

What is with us?

What is it with people who are hung up on a perfectly normal word like "wife" and continue to seek to express their lifelong commitment to a woman using adolescent terms?

Look, I'm not here to tell Mil how to run his life. I'm not here to shove my morals -- or even terminology -- down someone else's throat. But when the charge is raised that somehow we're the odd ones regarding marriage, it's reasonable to point out the contrary.

And since the question of having an unhealthy psychological hangup was also implied, it's quite reasonable to follow that where it leads, too.