Duplicate Keywords - List #48 (marriage keywords) (Proposals for Permanent Merger and Auto-Conversion)

@gromit82​ Thanks for your comments. I had anticipated these questions, so I am happy to respond to them.

First, the "adultery" keywords involve sex. The dictionary definition of "adultery" is "voluntary sexual intercourse between a married person and someone other than his or her lawful spouse."  

In contrast, the "cheating" and "unfaithful" keywords are broader, because there are more ways to cheat or be unfaithful to one's spouse than involving sex. For example, a spouse could create an online dating profile and even engage in phone sex or sexual online chatting. All of that would qualify as "cheating" but not "adultery." A spouse could maintain a secret romantic love affair with someone else and even plan a future with that other person without actually having sex with them. That would qualify as being "unfaithful" but not as adultery. These days, there is even such a concept as "micro-cheating" (e.g., "small, seemingly innocuous behaviors that straddle the line between faithfulness and cheating"). 

17 Little Heartbreaking Ways People Cheat without Actually Having Sex

How Partners Can Cheat Without Cheating

Emotional Affairs: Cheating Without Sex - E-Counseling.com

Why you don't have to have sex to cheat

The bottom line is that "adultery" involves sex, while there are many other types of cheating or being unfaithful short of adultery, and whether it is defined as cheating or unfaithfulness depends on the specific marriage and the people involved. I tried to respect those distinctions in this list.

As for my proposal to prefer keywords like "husband-cheats-on-spouse" and "husband-commits-adultery" over "cheating-husband" and "adulterous-husband," there are a couple principles at play here. First, my thinking is to align the formatting of these keywords with other existing keywords like "husband-cheats-on-his-wife" and "wife-cheats-on-her-husband." Yes, these keywords are longer, but they are more accurate and once the auto-conversions are put in place, people can type the shorter keywords and they will be automatically replaced with the merged keywords.

Second, I view keywords like "cheating-husband" and "adulterous-husband" as bad keywords for a couple of reasons. "Cheating-husband" does not even identify the cheating. Obviously it means cheating on one's spouse as opposed to cheating at cards, but it can't hurt to be more specific about that within the keyword.

Also, the keywords "cheating-husband" and "adulterous-husband," by using adjectives and by focusing on the character, have the effect of labeling that character as forever in that state. Consider a movie that covers a fifty-year marriage, where the husband commits adultery a single time early in the marriage, immediately realizes it was a mistake, and spends the ensuing decades completely faithful to his wife. In that circumstance, is "adulterous-husband" more appropriate, or "husband-commits-adultery?" I think the latter keyword is much more appropriate and accurate.

In short, these types of keywords should identify the act rather than permanently associate the act with the character. 

And while it's true that the keywords I am recommending don't currently exist, that might have been because of manual editing over the years by one or more contributors. Sometimes contributors have completely eliminated keywords through manual editing, creating the false illusion that their preferred keywords are more popular than they actually are. I'm not saying that is what has happened here, but it is a possibility. 

As for the "engagement" keywords, I had not even considered the possibility of these keywords being confused for a political leader announcing a military engagement. I think you're right that none of these keywords have that meaning or could be confused for it.

You are probably right that "engagement-announcement" will suffice as the appropriate keyword to merge into.

My thinking was to retain the "marriage-engagement" language within the merged keyword in order to distinguish it from the keyword wedding-announcement (28 titles).  I view the "marriage-engagement" keywords as announcing that a couple is engaged, and the "wedding-announcement" keyword as announcing a specific date for a wedding. But perhaps that distinction is lost on most other contributors, even with retaining the "marriage-engagement" language within the former set of keywords. Also, including "marriage" within that set of keywords might only add to the confusion and result in mixing up this keyword with "wedding-announcement." 

Accordingly, I will adjust the list to merge the "marriage-engagement" keywords into "engagement-announcement." 

Thanks again for your comments.

As for my proposal to prefer keywords like "husband-cheats-on-spouse" and "husband-commits-adultery" over "cheating-husband" and "adulterous-husband," there are a couple principles at play here. First, my thinking is to align the formatting of these keywords with other existing keywords like "husband-cheats-on-his-wife" and "wife-cheats-on-her-husband." Yes, these keywords are longer, but they are more accurate and once the auto-conversions are put in place, people can type the shorter keywords and they will be automatically replaced with the merged keywords.

A disadvantage of something like "husband-cheats-on-his-wife" is that it ranks low in a keyword search if you search for single words like "cheats" or "cheating".

@Peter_pbn​ This is true, but simply adding single words to the search like "husband" will rank the results much higher. Plus, if my proposed mergers are adopted, the higher numbers in the resulting keywords should rank those keywords higher. The IMDb keyword search results pages seem to be based on a balancing of how close the language is in each keyword to the search term, the number of titles per keyword, and the length of the keyword.

@Peter_pbn​

Just to provide some more context regarding the "cheating-wife" and "cheating-husband" keywords, as well as the "crying-" keywords currently pending in this other thread, I previously made similar recommendations for pretty similar keywords, and those mergers were just made by staff in this thread:

Examples:

arguing-couple (15 titles)  -->  couple's-argument (2 titles)  -->  argument-between-couple (75 titles)  -->   couple-argues (27 titles)

bickering-couple (95 titles)  -->  couple-bickers (1 title)

quarrel-between-couple (22 titles)  -->  couple-quarrels [new keyword]

In general with these kind of keywords expressing actions, I feel that it is best to express the keyword in a present-tense keyword that focuses on the action itself.

In other words, keywords like "couple-bickers," "woman-screams," "man-cries," and "husband-cheats-on-his-spouse" should be preferred over "bickering-couple," "screaming-woman," "crying-man," and "cheating-husband." 

My goal is to treat keywords like this with consistency across the entire set of keywords, even if that means in some cases creating brand new keywords to achieve that consistency. 

@Peter_pbn​ I will add that to the list. Thank you! 

You can make it one line since you already had

unfaithful (43 titles)  -->  unfaithfulness (1719 titles)

@Peter_pbn​ Whoops. Thank you.