Last week, while perusing the hot picks at Barnes and Noble, I was repulsed by a new title, Doree Lewak’s The Panic Years, which upon inspection proved to be yet another iteration of The Rules by Ellen Fein and Sherrie Shneider, advocating strategies and secrets of how to snare a husband before ovarian failure.

What was particularly terrifying was that this book defined the panic years, when a woman must switch from “dating for a fling to dating for a ring,” as beginning on a woman’s 26th birthday. Excuse my bias, but I thought these were the pre-dissertation years.

This isn’t a purely female cause for panic. Upon acceptance to graduate school, my friend Joe called me up to announce that he would be heading to Berkeley to get his M.R.S. Joe had a plan: he would leave the sausage fest that was life as an embedded reporter with the 82nd Airborne in Iraq and return to the West Coast, meet a gal at graduate school and start producing Catholic babies, with whom he could stay home and raise while freelance writing.

The idea that this could be accomplished in graduate school seems a tad unrealistic. Everybody I know who leaves school in a committed long-term relationship seems to have begun in one. Speed dating aside, there simply don’t seem to be all that many marriage proposals erupting from people who meet in my program.

In fact, statistics show that the higher a person’s level of education, the later that person is likely to marry or “pair off.” Hopefully those of you now panicking may be relieved — your love clock has a reprieve through the snooze alarm of graduate education. You may postpone your purchase of The Panic Years and enactment of its insulting suggestions (including fiancé profiling) for another few semesters at least.

There are of course exceptions. About one in four people in my graduate program are paired off. While many describe themselves as married, some people engage in alternative terminology such as the gender and legal status neutral term “partner.” The term can be confusing, precisely because of its neutrality and its lack of a socially agreed upon definition.

For most people who use it, “partner” represents a statement of equality and liberation from gendered divisions of labor and marital roles.

“It is common among academics [to use the term partner], particularly those that are critical of the status quo,” said Joel Carlson, a graduate student studying comparative religion.

He’s right. Several of my professors refer to their partners rather than to lovers, boyfriends or wives. Students engaging in critique and analysis of society often cite descriptions of marriage as “the commodification of women” and “legal slavery.” The term “partner” establishes the possibility of a monogamous commitment without engaging in the politics of more traditional terms.

Kacy McKinney is a doctoral student in the geography department who studies rural poverty. Her two-and-a-half year relationship has been legally registered as a domestic partnership, although this is not what caused her to take up the term partner.

“My partner and I began to use this term when we moved from dating to being a committed couple. For me, this difference is very similar to the difference between wife and girlfriend semantically,” she said. McKinney thinks of her partner, Sage, as not only a romantic partner but also a partner in every aspect of her life and uses the term because it encompasses both definitions.

Not all couples who use “partner” are officially registered, nor are they exclusively same sex relationships.

A quiet person who weighs his words carefully, Carlson seems the type to consider the nuances and subtexts of his linguistic choices. It is no accident that he does not say girlfriend or wife in describing his heterosexual partner of three-and-a-half years.

“We are partners in life who support and care for each other. However, the term also helps disrupt heterosexual privilege, which is important to us both,” he explains.

This is a meaningful consideration in a political scene, which has sought to actively oppose gay marriage in most states. Using terms like husband and wife make some married people feel complicit for celebrating unequally shared privileges of title and status.

“I feel that it helps to break down gender roles and norms, thus creating space for alternative lifestyles,” McKinney said. “As an undergraduate, I had a flamboyant professor mention his partner. I was later surprised when that partner turned out to be his wife. It meant a lot to me that he made the choice because I felt included rather than excluded by it.”

This use of the term “partner” is not a radical modern occurrence. In other languages, such as Kirghize, a gender-neutral description of “partner” is the norm. In Bristol, England, people often refer to their significant other as “my lover” without the overtly sexual implication of the term in the United States that is so wonderfully portrayed by Will Ferrell and Rachel Dratch.

Like using “my lover,” however, “my partner” can ring sour to some people. When mentioning this article to some colleagues, they laughed at the idea of using “partner,” and found it to be silly and pretentious. It is opinions like that, which demonstrate how using a certain word can be a political act. It takes courage and conviction to call someone your “husband” or “wife” in a room filled with smug “partners,” and equal or more courage to refer to your “partner” among the smug “married” hordes.

For those of us not yet paired off who have begun to consider the purchase of Lewak’s book, now might be a good time to ask: Do I want to be someone’s wife or someone’s partner? Think about the difference in strategy, if any, for the work ahead of you.