Usted used between girlfriend and boyfriend?

Question

On another course, an example conversation between novio and novia goes: “usted sabe que lo amo. Vayamos al cine, hay una película nueva que quiero que veamos. Me muero por que usted la vea”. It was partly my frustration that there was no explanation of the use of usted here that led me to look for another course. Can anyone here explain this to me? Is this a regional peculiarity? Maybe Colombia? Thanks.

Answer

Hola PeterYes, that's not unusual in some parts of Latin America. It is common in Colombia in parts of the Andean region and specific areas. So you may hear young people using the pronoun usted in an informal way.This use of usted (informally) is not a general use in Latin America as tú would be the general pronoun to use in informal situations and usted in formal situations; this is why we don't have any lesson testing this usage in Kwiziq Spanish as there are so many variants in Latin America, it would be impossible to include them all and test on all of them. The same goes for the pronoun vos, which is a lot more limited.Nevertheless we may include this bit of extra information in our informative articles as this is very interesting and it would help students who encounter this. Gracias y saludosInma