COUPLE vs. PARTNER

Good morning. I hope all of you had a wonderful weekend.

Today we will look at two more words (both nouns) that often cause confusion amongst English students; the nouns are couple and partner.

Couple means: two people who are involved in a romantic relationship, they may or may not be married.

Partner means: someone who you live with and have a sexual relationship with.

Notice that partner refers to ONE person and couple refers to TWO people. Consider the following examples.

Example 1
John and Mary have been dating for a long time. They really make a great couple.

Example 2
John has been Mary's partner for a long time.

Example 1 focuses on both John and Mary (as a couple) and Example 2 focuses only on John (as the partner of Mary)

Both couple and partner have other meanings (for example, partner is also used in business contexts to mean "one of 2 or more people who owns a company". However, today we have only focused on the meanings related to romantic relationships.

Enjoy the rest of your day, and try to stay warm.