National Boyfriend Day

The earliest "boyfriend" was not a sweetheart. Etymologists date the word to 1850 in a plain, unromantic sense: a juvenile male companion, a male friend from one's younger years.

A woman could mention her boyfriend and mean an old schoolmate. The word carried none of the charge it carries now.

"Girlfriend" walked the same path. It appears by 1859 meaning a woman's close female friend, and only picks up the "sweetheart" meaning by 1922.

Both words began as terms for a same-sex friend. Both got pulled toward romance later.

National Boyfriend Day arrives at the tail end of that long arc, and it arrives quietly. There is no proclamation, no founding organization, no documented creator. What there is, instead, is a footprint: each October 3 the hashtag #NationalBoyfriendDay trends, and the day gets covered as a real, if unofficial, fixture of the calendar.

That makes it honest to call it what it is. The press that writes about it tends to describe it as a "made up holiday", and it is. It is also, by now, a habit that millions of people keep, which is more than most official days can claim.