Thread:Spencerz/@comment-1618941-20130512073023/@comment-1618941-20130512083544


 * "Piggybacking on the middle ground point, simply deleting Dating as a category will leave a number of characters with technically false info"

Yes. For this reason I was thinking that bot-editing "Dating" into "Single" was the way to catch the bulk of that problem.

As far as the field label goes, "Marital Status" really boils down to just "Single," and "Married". Even marriage break-up terms like "Divorced" are really nothing more than distinctions on "Single".

As for the inflated list, your "Relationship Status" is probably about as good as it's going to get if you include something like "Dating" as a valid term. By that point I think things start opening wide. Too wide. With dating we get an official, recognisable, and easily quantifiable marital status replaced by a generic term for what people do on their evenings and weekends.

So yeah. I feel "Dating" should just evaporate in puff of logic at this point.

Where movie Stark and Potts are concerned though, I'm not too distressed about seeing the limits of the idea of a "Marital "Status" stretched to encompass their living arrangement together, be it "Domestic Partnership" or whatever. I'll have to look up your "common law" term - it's not that familiar to me, so could be more commonly applied in an American setting than mine, and I have an idea "de facto" similarly might be more common to me.

"Civil Union" though is something that should probably be ratified, just on principle if nothing else. It won't see much use on character articles yet, but the definition is pretty clear, and its increasing use would suggest to me that it will be increasingly reflected in comic books in coming years.