I think this topic is important, and thus I want to add to the pushback against the name!
I see that you’ve said “Note that these are gender-neutral: QAWYs can involve either being a wife or having a wife (or both)”, and I agree that the noun phrase does not semantically commit to a direction. But what matters in the name is not what your intended meaning is, but instead what people will think when they read it. And I’m pretty confident that a lot of people (or especially a lot of women) will read “Quality Adjusted Wife Years” and feel some sense that it’s objectifying the wife. That, plus the fact that it doesn’t apply in some non-hetero cases (as you mention), plus the fact that the community has always had a pretty rough time with gender balancing etc, I think makes a good case for not using that name.
Somewhat unrelatedly, you might also consider a name that doesn’t single out marriage qua the legal thing? A lot of people are just looking for something like “committed life partner”, and that doesn’t always involve legal marriage.
These considerations also seem more important given how much of the community is queer/polyamorous/otherwise non-standard.
I think this topic is important, and thus I want to add to the pushback against the name!
I see that you’ve said “Note that these are gender-neutral: QAWYs can involve either being a wife or having a wife (or both)”, and I agree that the noun phrase does not semantically commit to a direction. But what matters in the name is not what your intended meaning is, but instead what people will think when they read it. And I’m pretty confident that a lot of people (or especially a lot of women) will read “Quality Adjusted Wife Years” and feel some sense that it’s objectifying the wife. That, plus the fact that it doesn’t apply in some non-hetero cases (as you mention), plus the fact that the community has always had a pretty rough time with gender balancing etc, I think makes a good case for not using that name.
Somewhat unrelatedly, you might also consider a name that doesn’t single out marriage qua the legal thing? A lot of people are just looking for something like “committed life partner”, and that doesn’t always involve legal marriage.
These considerations also seem more important given how much of the community is queer/polyamorous/otherwise non-standard.