What to call him??

‘Boyfriend’ sounds like he’d drop me home in a car (because the city isn’t nice to girls at night), kissing my cheek lightly while he said a tender "goodnight, sweetheart". It sounds like he’d take me for a well planned dancing and drinking date, and hold my hand when I'd go to the dentist.

He’d be someone everyone assumes is my ride to the theatre (even if it was a group thing). He would know what clothes I had ("Why don’t you wear that black sleeveless thing with the V-neck?") and pat me proudly on my head if my earrings matched my shirt. It would also mean he is supposed to carry my luggage, and be nice to my friends even if he wants to strangle some.
Still, they call all boys with girls that.
"Do you have a boyfriend?" they’ll ask, if they see her with him more than twice. "You wont come for Sarkar? I’ll get two tickets for you?" It makes the boy someone I picked off the department store shelf marked ‘Boyfriends’. And I’d like to ask what he’ll be called if he was 30. Boys don’t automatically graduate to husband, you know.
And it makes him single-roled. And makes us a unit. No personality, no idiocity, no separate lives.

Lover, I’ll call him. Smiling, quiet. Light on his feet. Sexual. And not my conjoined twin.