My wife and I had a fairly easy path with regards to names for our son, but I was always very taken aback by how every single name you can imagine has an association tied to it. I’d say something like ‘what do you think about Carson’ and she’d say ‘no, I’m sorry, Carson is the name of a guy I went to college with who was a little handsy and smelled like peanut butter’, and she’d say something like ‘how do you feel about Garrison’ and I’d be all ‘no thank you, Garrison sounds a little bit too much like a man between the ages of 75 and 85 who speaks too often and too passionately about the Civil Rights Movement but on the wrong side’. It’s helpful, in the fact that it’s easy to parse down names to get to the one you want, but man you also realize just how many people have names you hate.
