An exacerbated husband turned to the internet for help after his wife demanded they name their twins Romeo and Juliet - and people weren’t impressed.
Concerned with naming his kids “after a fictional couple who die,” he asked Reddit’s “Am I The A**hole” thread for advice on how to get his wife to see his point of view.
As a concession, he was willing to pick another name from the Shakespearean tragedy for their son to go alongside Juliet.
“I even suggested that if we go with Juliet, maybe we could name our son Tybalt after Juliet's cousin,” he explained. But his wife still wasn’t willing to budge.
He continued: “I'll admit Romeo and Juliet is one of the only Shakespeare plays I've read, but I've tried to look online for some other Shakespearean sibling names we could use, like Ophelia and Laertes from Hamlet or Claudio and Isabella from Much Ado About Nothing.”
“She hasn’t liked any of them because either their source isn’t serious enough or the names aren’t recognizable/famous as Shakespearean,” he confessed.
The husband reiterated that his issue wasn’t with the individual names but the pair together. Stuck, he wondered how he could convince his wife her dream monikers were a “bad idea.”
“I'm not sure if I'm overthinking the meaning behind the names and being weird about it, but I can't talk with anyone about this because she wants the twins' names to be a surprise,” he said before asking his fellow Reddit readers if they had any other Shakespearean name suggestions.
Rather than listing off alternatives for the husband to bring to his wife, readers flocked to the comments section to voice their disbelief at her idea.
“Naming twins after famous lovers?? It’s not good, don’t do it,” one person urged him, while another agreed: “YOUR KIDS WILL NEVER EVER EVER FORGIVE YOU EVER, IT’S STUPID.”
A third commented: “Sounds incestuous. They will get a lot of unwanted attention from their peers for that.”
One helpful individual said: “Shakespeare wrote about twins! Use one of those. I like Viola and Sebastian, myself.”
“Just name them Jaime and Cersei at that point,” a fifth reader quipped, to which another responded: “And this is wildly almost better tbh lol. Romeo and Juliet association is so widely known... like when I hear the name Juliet I think of Romeo almost always anyway.”
In a follow-up post on Reddit, the husband, while branding her idea “deranged,” defended his wife, admitting her pregnancy has been “hard.”
“It’s her first, and naming the kids is the only thing she’s seemed happy about these days,” he said. “For context, she’s seen the Romeo and Juliet play in person and is an avid reader of plays in general, but she’s always liked Shakespeare most because they were the ones she studied.”
“After making this post, I asked her again why it had to be these two names,” he continued. “She told me she always liked symbolic meanings and grand declarations of love, and she wanted that sort of bond to carry over to the kids in a family sense.”
According to the Redditor, his wife’s reasoning for wanting to name their children Romeo and Juliet was also because she wanted them to be easily recognizable.
“I sat on this for a few days. And honestly, it felt like I didn’t know her. I pray this is her pregnancy brain talking, but this isn’t her,” he said. “She’s always been a romantic and fixates on trends/ideas but this is just weird.”
In an effort to try and get her to understand how inappropriate the names were, the husband showed her the thread of comments from his original Reddit post, but it only made her more upset. She didn’t have a break-through until her best friend stepped in.
He explained: “Her best friend came over after work, and I’m not exactly sure what happened, but I know they watched the 1968 movie version of Romeo and Juliet together, which I’ve been told has a sex scene. I think that snapped some sense into my wife.”
“Her friend left a few hours ago, and my wife’s been quiet, but she asked if we could look over the names I’d picked out again.”
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