The men who give the first name of an ex to their baby, a tradition as old as the world

Reading time: 2 min — Spotted on HuffPost

The tabloid press made a big splash of it for several days. Maroon 5 lead singer Adam Levine has come under fire for a cheating affair that might have seemed ordinary if his mistress Sumner Stroh hadn’t released screenshots of their text messages. Detail that caused a lot of ink to flow: in one of their exchangeswhich occurred after their separation, Levine explains to Stroh that his wife Behati Prinsloo is pregnant with their third child, whom he proposes to baptize her… Sumner (“I am very serious”he adds).

A lot can be said of Adam Levine, but in any case, points out the Huff Post, that no one will imagine that he was innovative by imagining to give his baby the name of one of his exes. The thing would apparently be commonplace. After the affair broke, many women explained on Twitter having been named in “tribute” to a former conquest or a former crush of their father.

On Instagram, influencer Dana Omari, who helped reveal the Adam Levine “affair”, received many messages about it, which she compiles in his stories. “My mother and her sister were named as my grandfather’s mistresses”can we read there. “I was appointed as a postwoman who my grandfather thought was extremely pretty. I was literally named as his potential mistress”writes another user.

Most of the time, this process takes place without the knowledge of the mother, which does not prevent fathers, sooner or later, from revealing this little secret to their daughters, as if in the end they had to boast of having accomplished this kind of feat.

Two victims in one name

The stories documented by the Huff Post are many and varied; some result in the belated discovery by women of the origin of the first name given to them – or that they gave to their daughters at the insistence of their husbands. In a first name, two generations of women are therefore affected: those who receive it, but also those who agree to give it to their child without being aware for a single second of what they are transmitting to him.

The article ends with an anecdote, told by a woman in her thirties. Her high school boyfriend had his first name tattooed, which he reminded her of the day she decided to break up with him: “What am I going to tell people about this name tattooed on my skin?” She could have simply retorted that you shouldn’t get a tattoo of just anything, but her answer was ultimately the following: “Say that’s your dead grandmother’s name.”

A few years after the breakup, the young woman received news from her former boyfriend. He told her that he was in a relationship, that his new companion was pregnant, and that the latter proposed… to give the baby the first name appearing on his tattoo, in homage to his late Grandmother. The story does not say if the future father accepted. We hope that he at least had the decency to decline this proposal, so moving on the surface, but so uncomfortable given the context.