Emily writes:

We r expecting a baby girl in 3 months. We are having problems deciding on a first name and pairing middle names. We chose our first baby’s name with such ease. I am worried that my and my Husband’s taste in girl names are so different, that we may never fully agree on a name like we did our son’s. Please Help!
Possible combinations that we are looking at that we cant narrow down or decided on:

Navy Lil (I feel like it gives it a girly touch and is my pick tho my husband isn’t sold. Lillian was a Grandparents name.)
Navy Jean (Jean is an aunt my husband is fond of) (I do think Navy Jean and Roland Deen sound cute…)
Navy Northern (I am afraid that it sounds too much like a boy name)
Navy Marks (Mark is my Husband’s name and for a girl I like with the ‘s’)
Capers Cruz
Capers Mark (Is it too much like a boy?)
Capers Lil
Kersey Cruz (Kersey is my Mother’s maiden name. I only like the names together and i don’t like Kersey alone.)

Any suggestions or outside opinions are very welcome!

If we were sitting together having coffee and talking this over, I think I’d start by asking for the story of how you chose your son’s name, and how you arrived at the candidates on your current list. Roland is an old and solid name with romantic/knight associations, and Dean is an old surname name that came into style again in the mid 20th century. It’s common for parents to have a different style for boy names and girl names, but the gap between Roland Deen and names like Navy, Northern, and Capers is a large and unexpected one. I would have expected a pairing more like Roland Deen and Lillian Jean, or Roland Deen and Lillian Kersey.

Capers is not currently used as a name in the United States for either boys or girls. The first syllable, which sounds like Kay, is very familiar as a name segment. The second syllable is partially found in names such as Harper, Juniper, and Piper, but -pers is not used as a name ending for any names currently used in the United States. For me the name Capers brings to mind the recipe ingredient and the actions of a court jester; neither is a positive association applied to a person. I also think of capes and papers and vapors, and I see a rearrangement of the name Casper.

A similar name is Caprice: it was given to 27 new baby girls in 2013.

Or would you like Cypress? It was given to 40 new baby girls and 24 new baby boys in 2013.

Navy is more familiar as a name: 78 new baby girls and 13 new baby boys were given the name in 2013. Navy Wingate has an appealing look to it, I think, though I find it a little less pleasing to say aloud.

Kersey is an interesting one to consider; I love the idea of salvaging a family name from your mom’s branch of the tree. If you don’t like it alone, though, it seems like it would be wise to cross it off the list: it’s likely that even if you started by always calling her Kersey Cruz, the Cruz would eventually be dropped. Would you like it without Cruz if Kersey were the middle name instead of the first name?

My next choice from your list is Navy Jean. My one hesitation is that it makes me think of navy beans and navy jeans—but does anyone actually say “navy jeans”? I don’t think so, but the pairing made it come to my mind. Oh, I think it’s because of Old Navy jeans.

A similar name is Ivy. Ivy Jean Wingate; Roland and Ivy.

Or Silvie. Silvie Jean Wingate; Roland and Silvie.

Vienna has sounds similar to Navy, in a different order. Vienna Wingate; Roland and Vienna.

Or Neeve, or Neva, or Geneva.

Mark as a middle name does spin the first name boy for me, as does Cruz. Marks brings to mind Richard Marx, Karl Marx, and the Marx Brothers. I wonder if you’d like Marlie? Or my mother used to know a little girl named Marksy and really liked the name on her.

Northern brings to mind Kim Kardashian and Kanye West’s baby North; that association may lose impact with time, depending on how successful the family is in holding the media’s attention, and you’d be using it as a middle name anyway. But ____ Northern Wingate sounds very place-name to me—like an area of town, or a gated community. I also notice that Navy and Northern are both varieties of beans.

It seems like what you like in a girl name is something unusual and distinctive, unisex or at least not frilly-feminine, and possibly also a word name. I wonder if you’d like any of these:

Avalon
Avril
Briar
Britton
Calista
Campbell
Carlisle
Clarity
Darby
Devany
Ellison
Emlyn
Greer
Haven
Hollis
Jensen
Keatyn
Lark
Lennox
Lyric
Madigan
Merritt
Oakley
Opal
Padgett
Paisley
Sterling
Wren
Yeardley

Some of these have issues similar to the ones mentioned above: sounding like places with the surname, or getting rather noun-heavy, or being a surprising combination with Roland. But these are personal preference things: if they don’t bother you, they don’t need to be taken heavily into account.

My favorite two middle name choices are Jean (family name, sounds great with so many names) and Kersey (family surname), unless you only like Kersey as a first name. Or Emlyn might make a middle name similar to your own name. Avalon Jean Wingate. Merritt Kersey Wingate. Paisley Emlyn Wingate. Padgett Jean Wingate. Opal Kersey Wingate. Hollis Emlyn Wingate.

Name update:

We are excited to announce that Navy Amelia Wingate arrived September 9th! She was 6 lbs and 8 oz and was 19″ long! Thank you Swistle for all of the advice!

Hilary writes:

I love your blog and I need your thoughtful advice! We are due in just 5 weeks at the end of June. After struggling with infertility, we are thrilled to be welcoming a little boy into our lives.

But…we are having a really hard time with the name! I had hoped this would be a fun process and we would choose a name we really loved together. But, it turns out we have very different styles. I don’t find it fun to talk names anymore. My suggestions are deemed “boring.”

I am a writer, and language and meaning and flow have always been really important to me. And unfortunately, I do not like the sound of any of the names my husband likes.

He is really, really into Germanic and Scandinavian names. (Made worse by a trip we took to Norway and Sweden this past summer.) Efforts to get him to come up with other names have failed–he’s just really focused on a small set of names.

People have asked if he’s Swedish, and he does have German/Dutch blood in his background, but that’s it. So it feels a bit weird to pick a powerhouse Scandi name.

I feel really terrible that I don’t like any of his choices! At this point, he says he just wants to pick something. And since this will likely be our only baby, I really wanted this to be a joint decision. Help!

We do agree it needs to be at least a two-syllable name. And we do have a middle name: Malcolm. It’s my father and brother’s middle name. The baby will have my husband’s last name: Pibb-with-a-G.

Husband’s choices:
Lars
Magnus
Gustav (which has become the baby’s in utero name)
Johan (Husband’s only name choice when we met 7 years ago…I am ok-ish with this one, we could use the nickname Hans)
Anders
Eugene (!)
Colin
(For girls, he loves the names June and Freya, which I could have gotten onboard with, and Penelope which I don’t like)

(Please note–I am from Massachusetts and I don’t want to call my poor baby “Lahs” and all these long “a”s get challenging for me, esp with Hans and Anders)

I would prefer a name with a B, G, or a short I in it as I think they sound better with the last name but it’s not a hard and fast rule!

Names I like in no particular order:

Asa
Hugh
Lewis (husband hates)
Ian (I love, husband hates)
Alden
Owen (too popular?)
Graeme (sounds a bit funny with the last name)
Benjamin (I really like this one, husband is ho hum)
Thomas (“boring!”)
Peter
Samuel
Julian
Christopher (nickname “Kit”)
Henry
Alfred
Fergus
Harald
Frederick (can’t use)

(For girls, I like Beatrix, Hazel, Helen, Susanna, Pheobe, Ingrid, Frieda, and Elisabeth)

Names we both like well enough but seem completely different in style:

Abraham (I love the nickname Bram, but this name too big? too biblical? Will he be called Ham? We do both like this one)
Oskar
Angus (husband loves Gus, but is this name too beefy?)

What should we do? Have I missed some awesome Scandi names that I could love? Should I just present my husband with an acceptable list and let him choose? Are there names that sound better with Pibb-with-a-G that we have not considered?

Is Abraham a huge and burdensome name for a kid?

Neither my husband’s name or my own lends itself to a nickname, which is fine, but it would be fun if the baby could have a nicknameable name.

Any help or suggestions would be much appreciated!!!

Name update!

Hi Swistle,

First of all–thank you to everyone who commented on the post! My husband and I had some really good conversations after we read through them all. (We were especially amused by the suggestions to use Ivan, which is my brother’s name! It’s a great name, in case anyone is considering it, ahem.) We took Oskar off the table, eventually, but still couldn’t make a decision.

My water broke early at 37 weeks. The night before, my husband had said perhaps we should use Ian. I was surprised–since I love Ian but he had maintained he hated it–until he confessed that night that since Ian Desmond of the Washington Nationals was doing so well, it didn’t seem so bad. (He’s a huge baseball fan.)

Next thing we know, it’s 5 am and we are running around in a panic trying to throw clothes and supplies in a bag. We ended up hanging out in Labor and Delivery for many many hours and flipping through the baby name book with increasing panic! My husband looked up from perusing baseball on his phone and said, “How about Desmond?” To which I said, “Like, Ian Desmond? Hey, I like that.” (I’ve lived in England and Ireland so it was a familiar first name to me.)

So, by the time I ended up with a c-section hours and hours later, we had 5 names on the wipeboard: Abraham, Ian, Henry, Desmond, and something I no longer recall. The nurses were very amused and offered various opinions. They were voting for Ian.

But when they finally handed us our baby, we looked at him and thought, this kid seems like a Desmond. And one year later, it still suits his sweet personality. We call him Des and Desi, and we are very happy with it.

(And my dad was thrilled to have his name as the honor name in the middle, and my brother was pleased as well!)

Thank you again!

Rachel writes:

I so appreciated the advice you and your readers gave me, regarding an honor name issue my husband and I had, when naming our first son (Miles Joseph). We are expecting our second child, a girl, this August, and again, are stuck on a middle name.

In fact, we aren’t convinced we have a final choice for a first name, but are pretty sure.

My husband and I both like the name Claire. I’ve liked the name for years, and even though I love searching for new names, I think it’s still my favorite. I like how Claire and Miles sound together. Our last name is Trude1le. We may want another child in the future.

We’re stuck on a middle name. Marie is my middle name, the middle name of both of my grandmothers, and the first name of one of my sister-in-laws. I like that it would honor my side (with our son, we honored my husband’s by using his middle name). But I see a few possible issues with it:
Claire Marie is the flip of the name of a magazine. I don’t know how strong this association would be for others (it’s not huge for me, but I am aware of it). Visually, does it make you think of the magazine? I almost notice it less when I say both names aloud. Is a magazine title a negative association?
I still have a desire to use a name that somehow honors my father, who passed away. His name was Eric, and we considered using his name as a middle name for our first child, but ended up sticking with a family tradition on my husband’s side (the issue I wrote to you about last time). Back then, I thought we could always use Erica for a middle name if our next child was a girl. Now, I’m not sure I like Claire Erica, or even Erica at all for a middle name. I do, however, love the name of my grandmother (my father’s mother, who also passed away), Maxine. Claire Maxine is a little more unique than Claire Marie and I would love to honor this grandmother, whom I was also very close to, growing up.

The problem with this is that my other grandmother is still alive, and I worry a little bit about hurting her feelings by using my other grandmother’s first name, instead of the middle name that honors them both. She would never say she was hurt, but it feels a little silly to honor one, when we could honor both.
I’d love to know your thoughts! Thank you so much for your advice!

Claire Marie doesn’t make me think of Marie Claire magazine, but it’s the sort of thing I would be glad to have thought of beforehand so I could make sure it didn’t bother me. It seems like a bigger issue if you plan to call her by both names than if she will be known as Claire and only a few people will know her middle name. The magazine association doesn’t seem negative to me in any case.

I also love Claire Maxine. And this is where you have run into one of the big issues with honor names: people who AREN’T honored. My own opinion is that if you prefer the name Maxine, and if you were closer to that grandmother, that you should go right ahead and use it. Reasonable people understand the idea that only a certain number of honor names can be used. Since you want to honor your other grandmother and you describe her as someone who wouldn’t say anything about it, I suspect she is a reasonable person; if you spin the name choice as one that honors your father, as well one that honors a relative who will never get to meet this baby, I think it is unlikely that your other grandmother will be hurt. And of course she has no way of knowing if perhaps you plan to use HER first name for the NEXT baby; she also wouldn’t know that you chose the name Maxine OVER the name Marie. It helps too that Maxine was a first name in your family, while Marie is a middle.

On the other hand, Marie is also your middle name, which gives me a happy mother/daughter feeling about the name. So really I think both middle names are good choices, and that you could go with either one. I have a slight preference for Maxine, for these reasons:

1. It’s less familiar as a middle name
2. It’s a first name in your family, which feels like a higher honor
3. The concern about Claire Marie reminding people of the magazine
4. I prefer the sound of it
5. I prefer the look of it (Claire Marie repeats four of the same letters)

But I like Marie for these reasons:

1. It has a happy “tying in with the girls in our family” feeling to it
2. It honors more people at once (though this then dilutes the honor somewhat)
3. I don’t think the magazine association is a problem

Let’s have a vote to see what everyone else prefers!

[yop_poll id=”54″]

Name update!

Hi Swistle,

Thank you so much for your help with baby number two’s middle name.  I loved reading your thoughts, as well as your readers’ comments.

We decided to use “Marie” for many reasons, but I especially like the parallel between our son’s and daughter’s middle names (our son shares my husband’s, our daughter shares mine).

Claire Marie was born on August 19th at 8:33 pm.

Emm@ writes:

I have a name question that is only partially about baby names at the moment, but I was hoping you could help me out – it will impact hypothetical future children.

My name is Emm@ V1ctory, and I have recently become engaged to J0nath0n W@rren-Wh1te. His parents each kept their surnames and hyphenated his. He has no middle name; mine is Ann.

My question is, when we do marry what should our names be, and what surname should we plan on for any future children?

I love my surname, and he likes it as well. He would have no problem if I kept my name (his mum did, after all).
I am not in love with his surname, but I think I would like to feel like we were connected in a naming way – I also feel like I would feel left out if he and the imaginary children shared a name that I didn’t. Perhaps V1ctory could be become both of our middle names, and the kids could either be V W-W or just W-W.
Also my initials would be EW-W – not ideal but also probably not a dealbreaker.

I’d love to hear your take on what all the options are, and what you’d suggest as the best choice.

Thank you!

One reason there are so many ways to choose a family surname is that the symbolism means different things to different people. Perhaps one woman feels as if giving up her birth surname symbolizes giving up her whole family and being absorbed into her spouse’s family, while the next woman finds it romantic to take her spouse’s surname. Perhaps one man worries that other people will think the children aren’t really his if they don’t share his surname, while the next man is thinking he really prefers the sound of his spouse’s surname and isn’t bothered at all by the difference. One couple might want to make a symbolic statement by choosing to go against tradition; another couple might want to emphasize tradition.

I struggled with this a lot when I was engaged to Paul. I didn’t like the idea of taking his name; to me it did feel like giving up my family and prioritizing his, and I didn’t like that all my children would then “belong” to his family rather than to mine. (I feel like I’m “a MyDad’sSurname” rather than “a MyMom’sSurname,” even though I know I’m just as much a part of one family as I am of the other.)

But I also didn’t like the idea of bucking tradition: I liked it in theory, and for other people, but I didn’t want any of the options in that category for myself. I don’t like having to explain things, and I didn’t like the idea of people assuming, for example, that my birth surname was my married name. We considered coming up with a new surname, but I didn’t like the feeling of THAT, either: I imagined people saying, “Oh, that’s an interesting surname, what country is that from?”/”Oh, are you related to…?” and me saying, “Um. We made it up.” I didn’t want to hyphenate, because it was bulky and seemed like a one-generation fix. I didn’t want to keep my own name and then have one of us have a different surname than our children. Paul was willing to take my surname, but even though that SHOULDN’T insult anyone (no one in the woman’s family is insulted if she takes her husband’s surname), we knew in his family dynamic it would be perceived as a huge symbolic slap; plus, I was back to not wanting people to misinterpret the family tree. I didn’t want to do an option such as giving the girls my surname and the boys his surname. I felt really stuck: NOTHING seemed right.

Eventually what I did was keep my own surname as a second middle name, take Paul’s surname as my surname, and do the same format for all the kids’ names: they have my surname as their second middle name, and Paul’s surname as the surname. It is not a highly satisfactory solution: clear priority is still given to the man’s family, and it’s a one-generation fix. But it was the solution I disliked least of all the options. When there are several preferences that contradict each other, eventually one set of preference has to be chosen above the others.

That’s the long way to say that I don’t know what you should do in your own case, because so many individual factors and personal preferences need to be considered. What are your feelings about the various symbolisms of surnames, and what are your fiance’s feelings? Which options are you both willing to consider? When you look at the consequences of each choice (having a different surname from your children, for example, or losing the family history of the surname, or causing family-tree confusion), which of those bother you more and which bother you less?

In the end, you may find yourself in the same situation as I was: ALL the options were wrong, and I finally had to pick one that felt the least wrong to me. I was fortunate that Paul was flexible about the various options: I think if he’d been stubborn about following tradition, it would have been harder for me to make that choice. It was hard enough as it was, and left me feeling resentful about patriarchal traditions without feeling like there was a better solution for my particular set of preferences.

In your case, you have some very nice things to work with. For one thing, you know that whatever you choose is not going to be perceived as a slap in the face to his family, since his mom kept her own name and his parents hyphenated their child’s name. For another thing, your husband is accustomed to a hyphenated name. For a third thing, because he has two surnames and you have one, there is some room to play around with combinations.

If you’re willing to hyphenate, I might suggest a new hyphenated name, with your surname and one of his surnames. The two of you could be:

Emm@ and J0nath0n V1ctory-W@rren
Emm@ and J0nath0n V1ctory-Wh1te
Emm@ and J0nath0n W@rren-V1ctory
Emm@ and J0nath0n Wh1te-V1ctory

If I were looking at that list for myself, I’d eliminate Wh1te-V1ctory because that selection/order seems to have its own symbolism. I also might eliminate W@rren-V1ctory for sounding like “war and v1ctory”—unless that were my favorite choice symbolically and I were willing to patiently endure the recurring “Oh, heh, that sounds like war and v1ctory!” (which I might very well be, and it makes the name easier to remember). If it were down to V1ctory-W@rren or V1ctory-Wh1te, I’d be influenced by which surname belonged to which of my fiancé’s parents (I’d be more inclined to carry on his mother’s name, since I’m annoyed that it’s often the mother’s name that gets dropped in the next generation of hyphenated names), but also by how he and I each felt about each of my fiancé’s parents (if, for example, one of them had been a poor parent to him, or if I found one of them very difficult to get along with).

Then you could give that same hyphenated surname to all of your own children, and your whole household would share the same surname.

Another option is for you to each keep your own surnames, and use one of those new hyphenated options for your children: you’d be Emm@ V1ctory, he’d be J0nath0n W@rren-Wh1te, and your children could be FirstName V1ctory-W@rren, or FirstName V1ctory-Wh1te. This strikes me as the most confusing of the options.

Another option is the one you suggest, where both of you take your surname as a middle name, and then both use his hyphenated surname. This pleases me less, similar to my dissatisfaction with my own solution: it so clearly prioritizes his names. I think it feels even more that way to me in this case, since you’d both be taking TWO of his surnames, and he has no middle name to sacrifice: you’d be giving up so much, and he’d be giving up almost nothing. But I like it better than the option where you give up your surname completely and he doesn’t change his name in any way.

To me, the reassuring thing is that in the long run it doesn’t seem to matter very much. I still get little flashes of resentment about my surname, but I don’t REALLY care very much, and there’s no solution I wish I’d chosen instead. I’ve adjusted to Paul’s surname, while still feeling satisfaction when I see my birth surname in my name and in my children’s names. I know of other families who made different choices, and the minor hassle of the parents having different surnames than their children, or the spouses having different surnames than each other, or of the family using a surname not previously used in their family trees, doesn’t seem to have greatly impacted their lives: so many people go different routes, I think society has adjusted to it. The two of you can do what you like best out of the options available to you from your own particular circumstances.

Name update!

Hi Swistle,

Thank you so much for answering my question on choosing surnames.

We were married last Saturday and were introduced as Mrs Emm@ V1ctory and Mr J0nath0n W@rren-Wh1te. The imaginary future kid will be a V1ctory-Wh1te so another generation can deal with hyphenation!

Thank you to your and readers for helping out. There are lots of options available and I think for my generation (early 30s) people do not necessarily expect a name change anymore. The general attitude in the comments seemed to be ‘do what’s right for you’ which was really good advice!

Thanks again,
Emm@

Update to the name update:

The hypothetical future kid became a real live baby this year – and was given my surname, at my husband’s suggestion!