M. writes:<\/p>\n
So this is my story\u2026its long and full of drama!<\/p>\n
I have a 20 month old little girl. When I was pregnant with her, my sister in law and close friend were both pregnant as well. Of course, we all had our list of names. When we started coming out with our names, we noticed we had a few of the same we liked. My top choices were: Gianna, Lola, and Isabella. Well, now all the babies are born. My daughter is Gianna, my sister in law named her daughter Marybella, and my friend named hers Lola. My friend has since moved to Miami, we see them about once a year.<\/p>\n
I have a long history with loving the name Isabella and anything Bella. My sister in law knew that and from the beginning, she told me they were going with Cecilia. Then, all of a sudden, it changed to Marybella. I was a little upset because the whole time she told me something else, and if I had another girl, she would be Isabella or Bella.<\/p>\n
Here we are, and I am pregnant with twin girls and my sister in law is pregnant with a little girl as well, we are 2 days apart in our due dates. I was stoked as I thought I would get to use all my favorite names when I pregnant the first time! I was going with Lola and Isobel (nn Bella). I am 27 weeks pregnant BTW. I was set on those names. My sister in law didn\u2019t care, because she knew when she named Marybella, that if I had another girl, Bella would be in the name. BUT my friend who lives in Miami, cares, I live in Texas. I decided to go ahead and talk to her about us choosing the name Lola for one of the twins and she wasn\u2019t happy. She said she didn\u2019t own the name, but that she wanted something unique and put a lot of thought into that name. When I was pregnant with Gianna and we were thinking about using Lola and they were too, they didn\u2019t care. Now it\u2019s an issue. I don\u2019t know what to do because I was set on that name to go with Isobel. From the first kick I felt, I called her Lola. Am I wrong to use that name? I\u2019ve tried to think of variations where we could use the nn Lola, but I\u2019m so torn! HELP!!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Hm. It is hard to know what to advise here, because it seems to me that it should be fine for you to use Lola (your friend knew it was one of your top choices even before she named her daughter; your friend now lives far away; the name Lola was #221 in 2009 and #211 in 2010, so not an ideal choice for uniqueness; you guys had agreed you didn’t mind if you both used the name), but it is not clear in this way to your friend, and that’s the important person for it to be clear to here. And she’s said she doesn’t want you to use it and, depending on how you brought the topic up with her (did it sound at all like asking if it were okay to use it?), may now feel even more upset if you go ahead and use it despite her feelings. Tricky situation.<\/p>\n
It’s possible and understandable that she may have changed her feelings about sharing names in the last year or two, and\/or since having a child with the actual name (as opposed to just considering candidates). And there could be other things we don’t know: maybe your daughter was born first, and although she knew the name Lola was on both your lists and she wasn’t going to fight you for it, she had decided not to use Lola after all if you ended up using it. Or maybe her daughter was born first, and she’d thought she was okay with name duplication until she found herself holding her breath hoping you didn’t use the name as well. Or maybe she would have thought it was kind of fun if you’d both had daughters named Lola the first time around, but is less keen on it with a 2-year spacing.<\/p>\n
These things can get kind of complicated, is where I guess I’m going with this. And it’s easy for an outsider to say “Psh, you should use it! It’s fine! She shouldn’t be upset!”—but of course much harder when you’re on the inside and it’s your actual friend and actual relationship and “should” doesn’t seem to be applying as expected.<\/p>\n
So in the meantime, I’d be looking at other similar names to see if there were any I liked as much; there are so many good ones with similar sounds\/styles:<\/p>\n
Cleo
Delilah
Elodie
Ione
Isla
Leila
Lila
Lyra
Marlo
Mila
Nola
Paloma
Rose
Selah
Stella
Thea
Viola
Willa
Willow <\/p>\nIf you don’t like any other name as much as you like the name Lola, you may need to make the decision to go ahead with the name despite your friend’s feelings about it. In which case I think I would be understanding of her feelings, but would gently persist in saying that the name had been on my list since the first pregnancy, and that I was so pleased to get a chance to use all three of my favorites, and that I hoped it would be fun for us to each have our own little Lola.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
M. writes: So this is my story\u2026its long and full of drama! I have a 20 month old little girl. When I was pregnant with her, my sister in law and close friend were both pregnant as well. Of course, we all had our list of names. When we started coming out with our names, […]<\/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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3iyiG-1BM","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6186","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=6186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.swistle.com\/babynames\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}