Significant other

They surveyed 100 Wisconsin adolescents, measured their educational and occupational aspirations, and identified the set of other individuals who communicated with the students and served as examples for them.

Results of the research showed that the expectations of significant others were the single most potent influences on the student's aspirations.

This usually takes about six or seven years, after which the significant other is no longer needed, and the child moves on to a general "other" which is not a real person, but an abstract notion of what society deems good or bad.

The first known use of the terms "significant other person" and "significant other people" is by the U.S. psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan in the article "Conceptions of Modern Psychiatry" in the journal: Psychiatry: Journal of the Biology and Pathology of Interpersonal Relations, published in 1940.

[5] The phrase was popularised in the United States by Armistead Maupin's 1987 book Significant Others, and in the UK by the 1989 TV series Only Fools and Horses, in which Derek Trotter uses the phrase a number of times when referring to his long-term partner Raquel Turner.