agonyaunt | (no subject)

(no subject)

Dear Care and Feeding,

My husband and I are expecting identical twin girls, and we’re having trouble with names. We have a 3-year-old son, and we love the family name we picked for him. We’re having a harder time coming up with names for our twins, in large part because my husband wants names that sound similar. I’ve heard testimony from numerous twins that this is not a good idea because it makes it harder for them to create an identity.

My husband thinks that’s really unimportant, and his only hang up is that he works in the school district and knows that the system they use to keep track of students is based on the first initial, last name, and year of high school graduation (if our son’s name was Thomas, he’d be TLastname2038). Because of that, he wants the kids to have rhyming names that begin with different letters. He’s been sneaky about it too, suggesting names like Isabelle and Eleanor, before suggesting we give them the nicknames Belle and Elle.

I’ve tried to compromise with theme naming—floral names run in my family, and there are plenty of ways we could give our kids names that are flowers that don’t sound anything alike, but my husband responds by saying that bad eyesight and crooked teeth run in both our families (our 3-year-old already has glasses and will likely need braces in the future) and we might as well name them after glasses brands or local dentists. I know families have trouble with names all the time, but I’ve never heard of a situation like ours. Most of the time you hear of parents who each have ideas for names that the other parent always shoots down. In this case our fundamental philosophies for picking names are different and neither of us are willing to compromise. My husband thinks it’d be cute, I have heard testimony from (perhaps overdramatic) identical twins telling me being named Anna and Hannah ruined their lives.

—Twin Dilemma

Dear Twin Dilemma,

Go find your husband and make sure he’s sitting down with you while you read this. I’ll wait.

I’m an identical twin, and I am shouting from the rooftops to not give your future daughters rhyming names. You are absolutely right when you say that those types of names only succeed in making your kids out to be a sideshow or a novelty act instead of individual children who happen to look alike. Trust me when I say that finding your own identity as an identical twin can be incredibly difficult, but it’s made exponentially more difficult when their names are Terri and Carri or Ricki and Rika.

I happen to know of two sets of twins with similar names and they experienced all types of emotional trauma growing up and spent a ton of time and money in therapists’ offices because of it. Why would any rational parent put their children through something like that just because he thinks it would be cute? It’s completely ridiculous and selfish in my eyes.

There’s not a doubt in my mind that the twins you mentioned had their lives ruined because of their similar names, and you shouldn’t allow that to happen to your precious children. There’s an endless list of alternatives for names that should satisfy both of you, and you need to do whatever it takes to find them. Heck, I would even go to a marriage counselor or therapist with this — but don’t give in. This should absolutely be a hill you should die on.

Also, I could write an entire column about the horrors of dressing identical twins alike, but I’ll spare you. Please don’t do that either.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2023/01/what-name-twins-parenting-rhyming-matching-advice.html

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So, family anecdote time!

My father, before he had his second child (me! also, it's my birthday!), was apparently known to opine that his mother was terrible because she often called one son by the other's name. The names were too similar, also, she sucked.

Not that it was my grandmother's fault that her boys were named Bill and Bob - Bill chose that name on his own when he decided he hated the name he'd actually been given at birth.

Anyway, as a consequence of this lasting childhood pain, he was careful to insist that his two children had names as dissimilar as possible.

And he rapidly found out that everybody mixes up names, no matter what, and it is immensely frustrating all around. (Though he still ended up semi-estranged from his mother for other reasons. Turns out that his anger at the name thing was just a symptom and not the actual root problem.)

Why on earth would you want to make life harder on yourself by choosing to give your kids rhyming names? No, it's just not worth it.

With that said, if LW cannot convince Husband of the wiser path then I advise her to go with one of those "trick" pairs like Isabelle and Eleanor and then either refuse to call them by a nickname at all or steadfastly call them something not matching such as "Isa" and "Nora". Let him do his own thing. What's he gonna do, file for divorce?

Happy birthday!

Thanks!

I'll confess, it was a bit happier before my dog wet the bed. That's on me, though - I did not understand what he was trying to tell me.

I don't understand why husband is being so intransingent, but then I do have the same experience as LW in that I've heard from twins with well earned opinions on twin naming. Is he always so stubborn or did he get a bee in his bonnet or what?

My mother was (is) a sibling of twins, and when she had a set of her own -- my brothers, who are identicals somewhere on the path to "mirror" (identical twin development is WILD yall) -- she absolutely refused to give them similar names or to dress them the same. She also refused to call them "the twins".

It was super weird watching as I grew up because some people would just REFUSE to believe she hadn't gone all-in on matching EVERYTHING and also it would've been sooooo cuuuute to match their names (my mother would say "They're people, not a matched set of ponies" with a dead blank look on her face to these people a lot)....and other people would just get this look of relief and excitement, and then start babbling about how wonderful that was.

I always wondered, as a kid, why people seemed so divided on that issue, because there wasn't any middle ground in the reactions.

(My mother did say to me once, "I'm not sure why I bothered making sure your brothers were never treated like a set. I just had a conversation with J, and then five minutes later, the exact same conversation, word for word, with G." I mean, they were still identical twins raised in the same family, mom, they were always doomed to be similar in some ways.)

All that (admirable, dgmw) effort, and your brothers' initials are J and G? I am assuming the G is hard as in Galahad (or the J is a glide as in Johann), or . . . I mean there are inevitabilities, but. (My brother was born at a time when you didn't always know in advance how many babies you were getting, and he was big enough that they thought he might be twins—in which event my folks had a non-alliterating non-rhyming name ready, though the name they used for the baby they got does alliterate with mine. Because 1970s, I guess.)

It took me a full minute to actually grasp the question ("are their initials really J & G? what the...why would i bother to obscure their initials?"). Heh.

No, their names do not have the same initial sound. G's name starts with a consonant cluster, in fact, so the initial sounds are even more distinct than they would otherwise be. They are named for their grandfathers.

Right? You could have John and George or you could have Joaquin and Grosvenor. ¯_(ツ)_/¯

I got asked, occasionally, whether my sister and I were twins. She is two years younger and in a different grade, but we had names starting with the same letter, similar clothing, the same haircut, and similar features. I was baffled at the time, especially because I wore glasses starting from the year before my sister arrived at that elementary school.

My husband is a twin and they were both named after their mother's father because his name could be split into two first names (before anyone looks in in weird fanfic horror, we're talking about something like grandfather is John Christopher, one twin is John, the other Christopher. No weird name smashes!) and everyone around her bewailed the lack of matching names and matching clothings.

Her cousin who also had twins appreciated her strength when his set of twins came along and he could do something similar with his father's name. (Charles Christopher, except I've used false last names here. I assure you they work much better with the real one.)

I admit when my twin cousins were born I was disappointed that my aunt didn't give them matching/rhyming names. But I was FOURTEEN. And in fact in mentioning it to a friend at school who was a twin she told me what a pain it was that her name rhymed with her sister's, so I learned!

I know adult identical twins named Ruth and Rachel, and I get the definite sense that they would prefer it if they had been given names that started with different letters (far too many people mix them up, because they both have R names)

I insisted that my daughter's first initial should be different from both mine and my husband's, because growing up I saw the confusion that sometimes arose because my parents had the same first initial. (Also because my mother was the doctor, which really threw some people.) As it happens, people still muddle mine and daughter's names, which are not at all similar, because mine is more common in her generation and vice versa. But I tried.

I had a neighbor whose dog was Mike and whose husband was Terry. It took me a full year to keep them straight. :D

I had that problem, and my sister and I are seven years apart.

Also - they may not be identical. I have fraternal twin daughters, who appeared on the ultrasound to be sharing a single placenta (as about two-thirds of identical twins do - the other third have separate placentas just like fraternal twins: it has to do with the stage at which the egg divided). The ultrasound technician said the placenta was so big she was pretty sure it was two that had implanted side by side and looked like one, and it turned out she was right. Though I have a lab report from after they were born that says it was a single placenta (I don't think they looked at it very hard). Anyway, my daughters have different coloring and indeed different blood types.

We gave our daughters first and middle names that were similar in terms of being the same general type of name - about the same length, the same degree of fanciness/plain-ness, and so on - but not rhyming, nor the same initial. (And we would have done the same had they been identical after all.) I'm trying to think of a good example that isn't actually their names - say, Rebecca Anne and Caroline Jane. So (in this example) both have the same number of syllables, but the accents are on different syllables, and one first name ends with a vowel and one doesn't, and so on. Inevitably people sometimes forgot which name went with which girl, but that happens with lots of siblings.

Oh, and despite all our efforts one of my sisters came up with rhyming nicknames for them based on our carefully-not-too-similar names. I wasn't sure she was actually serious, but I wasn't sure she wasn't, so I put the kibosh on that fast.

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