Anyone who’s ever been in a relationship knows there are certain things that you and your significant other do behind closed doors that nobody else can ever know about. While more dirty-minded people might assume I’m referring to weird sex things, those secrets are nothing compared to the one thing that some people will never let you live down: the pet names you call each other in private.
In my experience, routinely referring to the person you’re with by their actual name is the closest most people will ever come to knowing what it’s like to live on a spaceship where your only companion is a semi-sentient AI companion with a reassuringly disembodied voice. As a result, many people tend to gravitate towards potentially reputation-tarnishing nicknames like “darling” or “sweetie” (or “toots,” if you’ve ever wanted to know what it was like to be a chain-smoking traveling salesman ordering a cup of black coffee at a diner in the 1950s).
If you’re one of the many people out there who feels weird referring to your partner by their given name, you might not even know why you tend to gravitate towards alternative aliases. However, one professor told Broadley that she has a theory as to why pet names are a thing that would make Freud proud:
“My hypothesis is an extremely simple one. Couples, speaking this way, harken back to their own experience when they were infants and to their first love, their mother.”
Business Insider dove a bit deeper into the topic and revealed that using pet names might actually be the sign of a strong relationship. They pointed to studies that have shown that couples that refer to each other by nicknames tend to have a stronger bond than those who don’t.
You might have caught some shit in the past for calling your girlfriend “babe,” but at least science says you’re a better couple because of it.
