8 Weeks: Name Game - Don't Ask, Don't Tell

My sister is expecting her first baby (also a boy), and at the tail-end of an email on an unrelated subject, she enumerated a short list of names she and her husband are considering.

My response took her by surprise: I advised her to keep her ideas to herself. Obviously, she called foul, as I had exposed our name-selection process to the entire Internet, not to mention family & friends.

Mary and I would probably not do another public exposure of our name-selection thinking process. We definitely recommend keeping your list to yourself, for four simple reasons:

• Outsiders can have an unjustifiably large influence on your thinking/perception.
• Once you've put a name out into the wild, you'll feel that you've set expectations.
• Inviting others to participate in your name selection process may invite more participation than you bargained for.
• There's a disconnect between how seriously you, as a parent, will take the naming process compared with marginally-involved outsiders.
  

To elaborate on the above:

• Your favorite little name(s) are certain to find some people who don't "get it"; you just can't please everyone. But those few dissenters get inside your head and distort your perception of what might otherwise be a perfectly good name. They can put you off a front-running favorite, even though the individual might represent an extreme outlier for how a name will be perceived.
  
• The same distortion can happen in the opposite direction. A well-meaning friend might actively lobby for a name on which you'd otherwise be just so-so.
  
• If you manage to ignore the undue influence of vocal individuals, you're still not out of the woods: if someone close to you has a less-than-positive reaction to a name, you might hesitate to use it just because you don't want to offend that person.
  
• You might be surprised by the degree to which people are willing to share their opinions and get involved. Your idea might be to get a quick "positive/negative" reaction to a particular name, but once you invite someone's opinion, it can be delivered vociferously and revisited frequently.
• Especially for individuals outside your family, and even inside your family, nobody except you will treat your name selection process with appropriate weight. Somebody out there just loves the idea that some kid, somewhere, should be named Roxtar (lookin' at you, Andrew!). If it can be your kid, that's great, because you can bet they'd never use it themselves! Same problem affects the level of critical feedback you get when you yourself suggest a bad name idea. "Peach? Sure, why not... that'd be kind of a cute name... I guess. Yeah! Why not?! Do it!" Your friends simply don't have enough skin in the game to be useful in the long, arduous, and important name-selection process.
  
• Name selection should be a discussion (if not negotiation!) between two parents. We found that when we took our naming ideas to our separate groups of friends, those friends tended to reinforce our own positions. All my friends loved the name Emmet and all Mary's friends thought Eliot was perfect. This is understandable; your friends want to be supportive. But all that positive feedback from friends unduly reinforces your confidence that you have indeed made the right choice, and how can your stupid spouse just not get it!? It creates over-confidence in your preconceptions, and tends to make it harder to listen to a spouses reasoned considerations. It creates division when you really need to be coming together.

I will say that Mary was more susceptible to the negative effects of going public with our name selection process than I was... the sad truth is that I don't care if someone close to me hates a name and we use it anyway! But I do think that outside influences colored (or unduly strengthened) both of our perceptions, for better and worse, of certain name candidates. I still say the ultimate demise for my long-time first-choice, Emmet, was that a friend of Mary's told her it was common in Appalachia. Emmet never stood a chance after that!

Many people have asked how we ever arrived at August, since it was never really on the shortlist. People thought it came out of nowhere. (For the record, it was on the final list, and also evaluated in my fancy spreadsheet, where it ranked second among 12 names). The honest truth is that, toward the end there, we got sick of hearing people's opinions. With only a few weeks left, Mary decided she wanted to find a name that wasn't on any list, and keep it off this blog, keep it hidden. I despaired that we'd be able to do that because we had already worked very hard to find candidates we liked, and every single one of them had been blogged. I honestly thought we had considered every realistic possibility for us, at that time. I still do!

We talked less and less frequently about the subject as the due date approached, because it had been the source of rather a lot of conflict... possibly because we had been so public with the process. We had talked very briefly of reconsidering August a couple of weeks before the due date, and then just dropped it. Even after he was born we avoided discussing the matter until it wasn't realistic to do so any longer. Everyone asks you what you've named your baby!

After having witnessed what Mary had gone through in process of labor, I decided that she could choose to name him whatever she wanted... it should be her prerogative. But by then we had it down to Eliot and August. August won partially because I liked it better and mostly because it wasn't really on anyone's radar. As of today I'm very happy with the choice. Whether August himself will be happy or not remains to be seen, and that was really the objective... give him a name he loved, which would serve him well at all stages of life and regardless of what he should choose to do with it.