Really, that's your girlfriend?

I’m still struggling with the German. Given that it’s such a logical language, you would think that they would have separate words for friend and boyfriend/girlfriend. I’ll admit that I’ve found the all-encompassing ‘freund’ useful when a little ambiguity was called for (when getting chatted up, for example). However I feel very bad indeed that yesterday I told the lonely man in the flat downstairs that the cat he’s taken to feeding is now his girlfriend.