When something is constantly evolving throughout history, when do we claim it is “redefined”? Do we say it every time?

Of course we think of it in the big moments.

When we think of marriage, we think of the current marriage equality movement, and an earlier generation’s movement toward the legal acceptance of interracial marriage. But there’s much more: divorce, remarriage, annulments, plural marriage, levirate marriage: these have all “redefined” marriage in the last three thousand years and continue to redefine marriage throughout the world in multiple contexts.

There are smaller things, like generations of men in Europe erased by war, working mothers, unemployed fathers, victims of domestic violence, urbanization, and industrialization. There are nuclear families moving away from grandparents and hometowns and relocating them to wholly new communities. There are gated communities and busses and schools of choice and college educations. There are globalization and political movements and economic swings and depressed wages. And lest we forget the growth of latchkey children in the 1980s and the swing toward never-let-them-out-of-your-sight children of 2010s; mass shootings and police shootings of young black men.

All these microtransactions we are having in our culture have long ago moved the goalposts for love and connections far away from what so many think of as “traditional”. We are staring at the landscape, trying to better understand what we’re looking at now. In that way, “redefine” is the completely wrong word; for any “redefining” has long taken place, and many times over.

What we are left with is correcting the public record, the antiquated way we are speaking of something so specifically late 20th Century, so bound to a moment in time. So predicated on the sense of loss and separation from our history, that we needed to redefine our institutions, redefining the legal definition to match what we thought it was supposed to be to begin with.

Two decades later, we’re doing it again.

I suppose you can try to call it redefining. But that seems disingenuous. How about we just call it catching up.