{"id":11736,"date":"2015-11-23T11:58:29","date_gmt":"2015-11-23T15:58:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/?p=11736"},"modified":"2016-06-01T15:07:55","modified_gmt":"2016-06-01T19:07:55","slug":"discussion-baby-name-choosing-strategies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/2015\/11\/23\/discussion-baby-name-choosing-strategies\/","title":{"rendered":"Discussion: Baby-Name-Choosing Strategies"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hi Swistle,<\/p>\n

I have been reading your baby name (and regular!) blog for years and am currently expecting a little girl in March (yay!). But instead of asking for your specific advice, I was wondering if you’d be willing to tackle the more general topic of “name-choosing strategies.”<\/p>\n

I’m dealing with a situation that a lot of my friends have reported, too — the mothers-to-be come up with tons of name ideas, while the fathers veto almost all of them and seem totally unwilling to offer more than one or two suggestions.<\/p>\n

My husband is awesome and super-involved in every other way — he’s just completely unhelpful with the naming thing, and it’s stressing me out (and him, as I get increasingly frustrated).<\/p>\n

In your (vast!) name-helping experience, you must have come across strategies for dealing with these or similar situations. An shared spreadsheet with a points system? A baby-name-generating drinking game? (ok, maybe not the best idea for pregnant women) I would love to hear your general advice and I think it would be helpful for a lot of people.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

This is a question I thought would be a great one for general discussion: different things work well for different people, and making a reference section in the comments section appeals to me.<\/p>\n

Paul and I had a few things that worked for us. Since I was very interested in names and liked making lists, and he wasn’t and didn’t, one exercise we’d do is I’d have him look at my list and put stars next to the ones he liked best. We chose our second son’s name that way, almost disappointingly quickly and easily, because his clear favorite was also my clear favorite (and one he’d VETOED for our first son! I didn’t point that out to him).<\/p>\n

With our last son, we got down to seven names and had trouble narrowing it further—not because we were fighting, but because we both liked all seven names. The exercise we found most useful that time was to rank the names—not in 1-7 order, which was too hard, but in tiers. I had two that were my top choices, so I ranked those both 1; then I had several that were my next choices, so I ranked all of those 2; and then everything else was a 3. Paul did the same, and this let us quickly eliminate all the tier-3 names we had in common (because those were never going to get chosen over the other names), and notice which names were highest for both of us. We got down to two names this way.<\/p>\n

I don’t know if this counts as a strategy, but I tried to get Paul into the right mindset. For example, I’d say, “Don’t say yes or no to this name right away: I just want you to think about it.” I’d do the exposure method: saying a name to him over and over again in different contexts (“Baby Milo! 3rd place in the spelling bee: Milo Thistle! Milo, come to dinner! Milo, did you do your homework? Can you pick up Milo after school?”) until he got used to it. And I did the spinning-it method, where if possible I’d think of people I knew he’d like (scientists, authors, book\/show\/movie characters) with the same name as the one I wanted him to consider seriously.<\/p>\n

I had some luck too with setting up TIMES to discuss it. That is, instead of discussing it continually, as I’d have preferred, Paul seemed to do better if we’d arranged to sit down and talk about it over a dinner out, or during a particular evening. It also worked better to wait until later in the pregnancy: he had trouble even thinking about it until we were at least past the halfway point.<\/p>\n

One thing I liked about The Baby Name Wizard<\/a> book is that it let the less-interested-in-names parent work with smaller, more manageable lists. Paul didn’t want to look through an entire baby name book, but he found it much less painful to glance at a category and say yes to this type of name, no to this type. (Plus, it showed him that all the names on his list were 1970’s-80s names.)<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Name update!<\/strong><\/p>\n

Thanks so much for posting my question awhile back — the comments were super helpful. My husband and I ended up using a two-step process, partly inspired by some of your advice.<\/p>\n

First, we both downloaded a baby-name app onto our phones — a name pops up, and you swipe right if you like the name, left if you don’t like it. When you both swipe right, you get a match. You only see the names that you both match on. It worked well for us because (1) we could do it while watching TV and (2) it took a lot of the emotion out of the process (ie telling your partner a name you like, them hating it, and you feeling very “what?! how could you not like that name — it’s perfect!!”). Also, because you go through so many names, it reassured me that there wasn’t some Magic Name that we were missing.<\/p>\n

We set the app to give us both boys and girls names, which I think ended up being maybe a thousand? And we matched on just 24 (!). Some of the ones we matched on (including our final choice) were ones that we’d discussed before, while others were a complete surprise. From there, each of us individually ranked each on a five point-scale:<\/p>\n

0 – prefer not to use this name
\n1 – could be okay with it
\n2 – like it
\n3 – like it a lot
\n4 – totally love<\/p>\n

Then we added up the scores, and used the four highest-scoring names as the finalists. For the next few weeks we practiced referring to the baby as each of those four names.<\/p>\n

Sabine was born on March 27. We finally decided on her name about 24 hours after she was born — it was the only one in our final four that had a family connection (I actually don’t think her specific name was in the app, but “Sabina” was and we matched on that). She is the absolute best (though at this point we mostly call her Beanie).<\/p>\n

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Hi Swistle, I have been reading your baby name (and regular!) blog for years and am currently expecting a little girl in March (yay!). But instead of asking for your specific advice, I was wondering if you’d be willing to tackle the more general topic of “name-choosing strategies.” I’m dealing with a situation that a […]<\/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":[3,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-name-update","category-reference"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-33i","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11736","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=11736"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12141,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11736\/revisions\/12141"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}