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Relationships

Mom Says Her Husband Tricked Her Into Naming Baby Something She Hates, Asks For Advice

Twitter account @redditships usually documents the craziest Reddit posts about relationships for people who don’t want to make Reddit accounts to squeal over. They also sometimes share wild relationship stories from other sources, like this one posted on Slate. It’s an advice column about parenting answered by Nicole Cliffe. This story is a doozy.

The woman writing in to Cliffe says that she and her husband just had their second child. Right up until delivery time, he was pushing a name she didn’t like and so they hadn’t settled on one—but then he asked her while she was “in a haze of hormones and drugs” and she accidentally agreed.

He very much wanted to name our child after a family member, but it was a name I strongly dislike, so I said no repeatedly through the pregnancy. He asked me again shortly after the baby was born, and in a haze of hormones and drugs, I agreed. Within a few hours I regretted this, and he told me to just wait and see how I felt in a few days. In the meantime, he told everyone in his family the new name, including the person the baby is named after. I felt we couldn’t change the name without me being the bad guy.

She immediately regretted it. Six weeks later she says she still hates the name and tries to never say it:

I don’t see any way to really change the name now, and there’s nothing objectively wrong with the name itself. I don’t know if this is some weird postpartum hormones, a pandemic, parenting two little kids … but I can’t stop thinking about it. I’m resentful and angry at my otherwise great spouse. Would love your thoughts on how to move past this.

The comments on Twitter are basically, “Throw the whole man away!”

Nicole Cliffe’s advice is somewhat more moderate, maybe because she recognizes dumping someone during a pandemic with two babies to raise isn’t the easiest thing to do. Cliffe says the woman’s husband did take advantage of her, and she has every right to be angry:

Regardless of what you do regarding the name, you need to talk about how this went down, how you feel steamrolled by his behavior, and that you would like an acknowledgment and ideally an apology. I guarantee he knows he pulled a fast one, and you do not want to begin your journey as parents together without establishing that you’re a team, and he let the team down at a very fragile moment. I would bring it up on a good day when you feel emotionally stable and able to have a difficult conversation.

She adds that changing the name is not impossible, and also that the new mom might come to be comfortable with it in time, or find a new nickname that works. It’s hard to imagine that, but words are probably the first step…to calling the man disposal service.

h/t Slate

More terrible spouses:

Aimeé Lutkin