{"id":11223,"date":"2015-04-24T09:49:29","date_gmt":"2015-04-24T13:49:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=11223"},"modified":"2016-08-10T11:21:24","modified_gmt":"2016-08-10T15:21:24","slug":"baby-naming-issue-how-do-you-let-go-of-your-favorite-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2015\/04\/24\/baby-naming-issue-how-do-you-let-go-of-your-favorite-name\/","title":{"rendered":"Baby Naming Issue: How Do You Let Go of Your Favorite Name?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle,<\/p>\n

I have been reading your blog for several years now and have been dreaming about the day when I could ask you for your advice about my own baby naming issue. I am not actually pregnant yet, but my husband and I are going to start trying to get pregnant in the next year, so I thought I could finally send in my question.<\/p>\n

Happily enough we are set to go on a boy’s name. He will be Dev Avigdor. I know that’s a mouthful, and may be a cross cultural explosion, but it is bound to happen because my husband is from Nepal and my family is Jewish. Dev is an Indian\/Nepali name that bears a strong similarity to a lot of Hebrew names for boys. We both love it. Avigdor is the Hebrew version of Victor, which is my father’s name. Jews don’t normally name their babies after living relatives but I feel strongly about honoring my father and I wanted to buck that particular tradition.<\/p>\n

Anyway, I digress. The issue is with a name for a girl. I have loved one girl’s name for as long as I can remember. I think it all started when I read the book Great Expectations as a child, and just fell in love with the name Estella. My family is very into books and theater, especially British literature and theater, so I was raised with the heroines of Austen, the Brontes, and Shakespeare in my head. Needless to say the names I am most attracted to for girls are very feminine, romantic, and a little mysterious. Estella fit that perfectly because she was a stunningly beautiful woman in the book and slightly mysterious and untouchable. Also completely randomly, I have had a serious obsession with stars for my whole life. I’m sure it’s a pretty common affinity, but I have spent countless hours as a child and an adult staring up at the night sky in utter amazement. That the name Estella had the star connotation too was just icing on the cake. I have always planned on naming a baby girl Estella and hadn’t even considered other names. It also fits my popularity criteria, which is that I want a name that people have heard of and is easy to spell, but is also as far down as possible on the top 1000. I NEVER want a child to have to go by their first name and last initial in a classroom.<\/p>\n

I brought up Estella as soon as my husband and I starting talking about names………and he doesn’t like it. He doesn’t hate it, but he says it reminds him of beer because his favorite beer is Stella Artois. I gradually started looking around and thinking of other possible girl names. I actually read on your blog about a woman considering the name Marina for her daughter and was very drawn to it. I like the water theme, I like the sound, and it seems to meet my popularity requirement as well. I mentioned it to my husband and he was completely on board. So we settled on it. I think it’s a lovely name, and I really have tried to get behind it 100%, but the truth is that every time I think about it, and do all the tests you suggest (imagine calling the doctor to make an appointment for her, or talking to her teachers about her, or even introducing her to friends) I keep thinking, but it’s not Estella. I don’t know how to let go. I am worried I will never have the same pride in saying Marina as I do when I think about the name Estella. I don’t want to regret such an important decision but I also don’t think I can force my husband into a name he doesn’t like.<\/p>\n

Any suggestions from you or your readers on how to let this name go and be happy with our new choice would be endlessly appreciated. In case it’s helpful, our last name is pronounced Tah-pa, just like the Spanish appetizer “tapa.”<\/p>\n

Thank you so much for the help!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

My first suggestion is to not give up yet. During my first pregnancy, Paul completely rejected a boy name I liked. During my second pregnancy, I put that name back on my boy name list—and when I showed Paul the list, he chose that name as his top favorite, and we used it. (I did not mention to him that he’d rejected it before.) Since you are not pregnant yet, and when\/if you do get pregnant might not have a girl, it is not yet time to grieve over the name. If I were you, I would just keep that name in the air around your husband: don’t push it or he might set his mind more determinedly against it, but continue to keep it on your list and let his ear get used to the sound of it. (And maybe get him some new beers to try.)<\/p>\n

It’s common for someone to reject a name initially and then have it grow on them. We’ve even had letters where the writer says her favorite name can’t be used because her husband hates it (HATES it), and then when we get the follow-up, they’ve used that name because he decided he loved it after all. Perhaps you will have your first child in two years, and it will be a boy, and then it will be another three years before you have a daughter, and then your husband will still reject your favorite name, and then three years after THAT you will have a SECOND daughter and by then he will have come around to it.<\/p>\n

So there is hope. But let’s deal with the situation where there isn’t: where it turns out that your husband never agrees to use the name as the first name for a daughter.<\/p>\n

My first suggestion is to push for it as a middle name. It can be tremendously comforting to get to use the name SOMEWHERE, even if it can’t be as the first name. Middle names can be as active as you want them to be: you can call her Marina Estella or even use Estella as a nickname; you can decorate her room in a sea-and-stars theme; all the meaning you attribute to the name can still be right there as part of her name. It may not be as good as having it as the first name, but it will be better than not having it at all. Perhaps it will happen that your husband’s first choice is your second choice, and you will be able to use it as a bargaining chip: “Well…all right. How about if we use your first choice as the first name, and my first choice as the middle name?”<\/p>\n

My second suggestion is to see if you can find another name that you love in the same way you love the name Estella, but a name that your husband likes also. Celeste, for example. It sounds much less like his beer, but still has the celestial meaning. It loses the image of the Estella in the book, but stunning beauty and seductive untouchability may not be an expectation you want to set for your daughter anyway.<\/p>\n

My third suggestion, if the first and second suggestions don’t work out, is to feel the comforting cloud of our full empathy. Everyone interested in baby names has a list of names they can’t use, either because the name doesn’t work with the surname, or because the baby’s other parent says NO WAY, or because coincidentally it’s the name of their husband’s ex-wife, or because they run out of children before they run out of names, or because they have all girls or all boys and never get to use their top choice for the other sex. It won’t fix the problem to know your misery has company, but it might be soothing.<\/p>\n

It might also be soothing to hear other people’s experience of names clicking into place once the actual child is here. I can’t guarantee it, of course, but my strong prediction is that if you have a daughter and name her Marina (or whatever name you decide on between now and then), you will not permanently think “But it’s not Estella” every time you say her name. Soon, in fact, you might find it hard to believe that you considered any name other than Marina, even if you continue to love the name Estella. “Ah!,” you might think, “It’s not Estella because THIS IS NOT ESTELLA. This is Marina! Maybe Estella will come later, or maybe not, but this right here is MARINA.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dear Swistle, I have been reading your blog for several years now and have been dreaming about the day when I could ask you for your advice about my own baby naming issue. I am not actually pregnant yet, but my husband and I are going to start trying to get pregnant in the next […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11223","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reference"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-2V1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11223","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11223"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11223\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12265,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11223\/revisions\/12265"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11223"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11223"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11223"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}