Russian Language - one of the richest in the world in terms of lexical units, but still there's no decent word for calling your "boyfriend". This problem has been following me all my life.

Really, when you think of it, we have only four words you can use when talking about your sweetheart. That are : парень, молодой человек, мальчик и бойфренд.

Парень  - means "a guy", some male age between 5 and 55. You are joking of course if call someone парень at 55, but still you can. When talking about your boyfriend you can say "мой парень" which would define your rights over him, my guy. Still not so convincing and not elegant at all.

Молодой человек - literally means "young person". Well, sure your boyfriend is young (and handsome) but still you don't want to call your sweetheart a young person, right? But молодой человек is one of the most commonly used words for the "boyfriend" in Russian!!! Sometimes you can see it in magazines written like "мч" (bf) - it's in the abbreviation often used by girls complaining about their мч and asking for advise. In the end, i think, молодой человек is too long word to say.

Мой мальчик - "my boy" - can be referred to a boy between age 1-12 as well as to your boyfriend. Here you always use possessive pronoun "мой" otherwise it'd sound too weird.. Anyway, out of three evils, I think, this is the least one. Actually, I even like how it sound - fond and loving :)

Бойфренд - spelling of "boyfriend" in Cyrillic is the most popular choice among the young people now but since it's not Russian, we won't consider it.

In any case it really bugs me - why oh why there's no decent word in Russian for your dearest one??? One of my friends made a brilliant guess : "Of course there's no "boyfriend" in Russian - because you didn't have one back in history. There were boys and girls and they were brought up separately under the watchful eye of the nannies ; after came time of matchmaking and BOOM you were married at the age of 16 with 17-year-old husband on hands - what boyfriend are you talking about???" 

Maybe she is right, but 100 years could have changed something...