If you think naming a baby is hard, try naming a husband.

One final hurdle in my memoir has me thinking about names, identity, and Internet haters.

Last week I checked off a huge milestone in the life of a debut author. I completed the final edits on my memoir and sent it back to my publisher. Yay!

After finishing two drafts by myself, a sprinkling of changes with my agent, and one round with my editor, I took immense satisfaction in seeing the notes on the margins dwindle away to an almost-negligible handful.

From here on, the manuscript goes to a copyeditor then to a typesetter, taking the next step in its life journey from digital file to physical object. Shit’s getting real, folks.

I’d reached a point of no return. Only one decision was left to be made, and it was a big one. I’d fretted, flip-flopped, and floundered over it for months. Now I had to commit.

What should I name my husband?

From the beginning, I was clear that my book would bear my real name. If I wanted to make my name as an author, I would stand by my truth and my choices, my lessons as well as my mistakes.

When so much of my story is about the unlearning of shame, to hide behind a pseudonym was to distance myself from my own life. Doing so would rob my story of its own power. It would mean that I still believed this part of my life should remain hidden.

To use my real name is to step out of the shadows of shame, and say: I stand by my choices, in life and on the page.

I was clear that this choice was mine alone, so I changed the names of everyone I wrote about. I used real names in my first draft, and swapped them out (and changed identifying details) in the second.

To those I cared about and was close enough to, I offered the choice of their own alias. Five of those people were happy to keep their real names, which made me feel stronger and prouder, as though they were standing by me, too.

Through all the drafts and versions, there was only one name I couldn’t seem to change—my husband’s.

Have you ever called your significant other by another name? I’m not talking about by accident, or a term of endearment, or even a *voice drops to a throaty whisper* kinky bedroom pet name. I’m reminded of that Modern Family episode where Phil and Claire meet up in a bar for some hilariously awkward role play, and their alter egos Clive Bixby and Julianna are born. That, I can get behind. That’s fun!

But thinking of my husband by any other name than his own just felt… strange. It truly hurt my brain, which kept throwing itself at this problem only to run into a brick wall again and again.

Go on. Try it. Just for a day. Call your beloved Bob a Jim, or your darling Carla a Beatrice. Tell me if you struggle too, or it’s just me.

A brief personal and professional history of naming

Look, I’m no stranger to wrestling with names. I grappled with mine for the first seventeen years of my life.

After my oldest sister was born, my paternal grandmother was very put out that the baby had not been given an Indian name. Never mess with Indian grandmas.

For the next five years, Dima waited with the patience of an owl and the cunning of a tiger. She pounced on my birth, sent a telegram flashing from Kolkata to St. Luke's Hospital in Quezon City on lightning wings, bearing my name in its teeth.

A decree in four words. Her name is Deepa.

Catherine, the name my mother had chosen, was shunted to second place, banished to the void of the forgotten. Plucked from gothic romance and the cold, windswept moors of England, it was ill-suited to tropical chaos and Asian family politics. I tried to retrieve it many times throughout my childhood, but it kept sliding back into the abyss.

"You're not a Catherine," everyone would say, wrinkling their noses. “You look like a Deepa."

When I finally came to terms with my name, I wrote about it in an essay that I submitted to Seventeen Magazine (hand-delivered in a brown envelope no less!), which nailed me my first byline and published article at the age of—you guessed it—seventeen.

It was a move that kickstarted my writing career and would become an ingrained pattern for the rest of my life: struggle, accept, write. Struggle, accept, write.

Upon reaching adulthood, I channeled my frustration at my own failed rebrand into a career that would give me the power, or at least the illusion of it, to name things.

I became a copywriter.

The name hall of fame: from vegan balls to sex toys

Among other things, I am a professional namer. People have paid me to come up with names for businesses, brands and products. The skill is right there on my LinkedIn (so it must be true) and in fact, I’m quite good at it.

Among the things I’ve named include sex toys (many sex toys, entire clans of sex toys), lubricant, sex furniture (not to be confused with sex toys), TV channels, vegan ready-made meals with soy-based balls, and a host of businesses from events to film to a tech company that makes a kind of Fitbit for horses.

It’s become almost second nature. Sometimes my brain just can’t stop itself from putting two words together to coin a silly new one in mid-conversation. I’ve been known to reply to Whatsapp messages with a made-up brand name punctuated by a ™ emoji.

I suggested our American friend Kristie rename her Superbowl snacks the Rice Kristies™; the end-of-day, wine-and-writing-chat with my mentor became the Five O’Clock Fancies™; a chat and a shag merged into a Chag (as in, sorry I can’t come over for a Chag™, I’m slammed today).

On the home front, I’ve named both my laptops (a hefty 17-inch Acer was The Beast, followed by a svelte Macbook Air named Belle) and bicycles (Ginger and Pepper). Even our bellies—mine, my husband’s, and my daughter’s—have very secret, very jiggly nicknames.

So why can’t I name—or rename—my own husband?

Wait, does he even need an alias?

With a memoir about my open marriage coming out in Spring 2025, I’m about to put my life on worldwide blast. Let’s face it: the overwhelming consensus is that the Internet can be nasty.

Perhaps the hope is that an alias will serve as an invisible force field, a layer of protection between my loved ones and the seething army of anonymous trolls and haters, who will undoubtedly launch their vitriol at me and my life choices.

For the record, my husband does stand by our story. It’s me who feels a responsibility to protect him, and my daughter and boyfriend, from the haters of this world. I want as little of that as possible to affect my people. For this reason, my daughter is completely unnamed in the book; I’ve already archived over a thousand Instagram posts with her face in them.

The idea is to add a dollop of extra hassle to anyone who might look up his real name and find him on LinkedIn, send him hateful messages, or worse. I’ve already read too many horror stories of the cancelled and doxxed; I don’t want to think about what else the Internet is capable of.

But… are we being paranoid or are we being naive? Is it easy to Google and harass him anyway? Is there really a point to changing his name, or should he stand by our story as I did? For the story of this open marriage is ours as much as is it is mine.

These doubts came up repeatedly throughout all the of yes-we-should, fuck-it-we-won’t discussions with my husband. But I think they all stem from one giant unknown, unanswerable question: what do we really have to fear from Internet strangers?

Or: how bad can it really get?

Can you hear the drums, Fernando?

Everyone I asked for advice had their own side, their own reasons. My mom and sister in Manila both wanted me to change his name; both my agent and editor in London were surprised I’d even thought of it.

“What about John?” offered my editor. “Whenever I think of your husband I get this real cool, calm, steady energy. Just… cool. Like John Legend.”

“Sherman?” volunteered my agent. “Don’t take that seriously. That’s only because I know a Filipino guy named Sherman.”

I consulted lists of Filipino names, and by colonial association, Spanish ones. We ran through all of Marlon Brando’s roles on IMDB, and all the names in The Godfather (too Italian). The name had to feel like it could be someone we’d gone to university with, but it also had to be simple and easy so readers wouldn’t trip over it.

My husband and I tossed names back and forth for ages, a private word association game that teetered on the ridiculous and sent us into fits of giggles.

“Hmmm… what about Fernando?” Can you hear the drums, Fernando?

“Enrique?” Too Iglesias.

“Miguel?” Husband was tormented by a grade school bully named Miguel, so no.

“What about that guy you had a crush on in college?” I have to admit I almost gave in. But which one? There were dozens. I’m not naming any of them here.

“Lovejoy. LJ. Eljay.” Squawks of horror to my chortles of glee. Lovejoy was the name my husband’s mother would have given him if he’d turned out to be a girl. Thankfully he didn’t!

“I know! Crisostomo.” Filipinos will think we’re being too literary and pretentious. Besides, no one names their son Crisostomo without a nickname.

“I have it! Mharlon… with an h. It’ll be so Filipino. It’ll be unrecognizable.”

We collapsed, laughing.

And the winner is…

As of this writing, the decision has been made. The final draft went back to my editor last week. I guess you’ll have to wait until March 2025 to find out what I chose in the end. Maddening, I know! 2024 can’t fly by fast enough, right? But once both of us made the choice, it felt like the right one.

If you were me, what would you do?

Could you imagine calling your partner by any other name?

What would it be and why?

More crucially, how can I, and the people close to me, prepare ourselves to face online discourse and Internet criticism?

Can any of us really shield ourselves from the Internet? Or is it just a thing that has feeds on our attention to give it power—power that fizzes into the ether once we unplug ourselves and turn towards the infinite joys and depths of life beyond the screen?

You tell me. Or let’s find out together, a year or more from now.

Until then, life offline tugs at my sleeve, saying: put that down now, dive in and let’s live. Here in Amsterdam, a frigid snap has warmed into the delicate, distant hope of an early spring. The daffodils are up early; with them, new schemes and selves are waking, softening, emerging into being.

Thanks for being here.