The Dog Will Not Be Named Gary

Dear Priscilla,

I've been dating my boyfriend, Tom, for eight months, and things are going really well — he's kind, he remembers my coffee order, and last week he told me he loved me for the first time. The only hiccup is that we've started talking about getting a dog together, and Tom wants to name it after his college roommate, Gary, "as an inside joke." I think it's a little strange to name our dog after another man, even in jest, and Tom says I'm reading too much into it. Am I overreacting?

— Meredith, Tulsa, Oklahoma

A lovely question, Meredith. It reminds me of the autumn of 2003, when I too believed that naming something after a person was just a harmless little bit of whimsy, a private joke between two people who loved each other and had nothing whatsoever to hide.

I was engaged, then, to a man named Desmond, who grew a single cactus on our windowsill with the devotion other men reserve for firstborn sons. He watered it on a schedule. He rotated it toward the light. And one evening, over a dinner I had cooked entirely from scratch, including a compote, he informed me that he had named it. Deborah. After his ex-girlfriend. "It's just a plant, Priscilla," he said, in the exact tone Tom is using on you right now, Meredith, which is how I know precisely where this is headed and why I must beg you, gently, to listen to a woman who has been to the place you are currently standing at the edge of.

I told myself it was nothing. I told myself a cactus was not a threat. But six months later I discovered that Desmond had also named the ceiling fan "Deb," and the good kitchen scissors "D," and I understood, far too late, that I was not living with a man and his cactus — I was living in a shrine with visiting privileges. When I finally confronted him, he wept and said I had never understood his "naming philosophy," as though this were a coherent worldview and not a five-alarm fire I had been standing inside for a year. Do not make my mistake, Meredith. A name is never just a name. A name is a flag a man plants in a thing so he can visit the person he actually misses without ever leaving the room.

Now, I want to be fair to Tom, whom I have never met and who may well be exactly the sweet, coffee-order-remembering man you describe. Perhaps Gary is simply an old friend, and the dog will simply be Gary, and nothing more sinister than a mild lapse in naming taste will ever come of it. But I would be doing you a disservice as your columnist and as a woman who has rebuilt her life from the studs up if I did not tell you what I have learned in the years since Desmond, across a catalog of subsequent misfortunes I have catalogued with the rigor of a woman filing for the historical record.

There was, for instance, the falconer — I will not use his name, as I have found it is bad luck to say it aloud on a Tuesday — who left me in the spring of 2003 for a woman he met at a Renaissance faire, and who, in a detail I still find genuinely difficult to speak about, had also asked me, six weeks into our courtship, if he could name his falcon after me. I said yes. I was flattered. I did not yet understand that being the namesake of a bird of prey is not a romantic gesture, it is a rehearsal for the day the man himself flies off your glove and doesn't come back. That same falconer, I should mention, also left me at my own housewarming party in 2007, which I recognize does not line up chronologically with the spring of 2003, and I have made my peace with the fact that certain betrayals exist outside of linear time. Grief does that. It pools.

Then there was the fiancé — this was after Desmond, before the falconer, or possibly during, the years blur in a way I've stopped fighting — who left me for competitive topiary, an entire sport I did not know existed until it took him from me, hedge clipper in hand, forever. And there was the man who stole my mother's casserole recipe and submitted it to a regional cook-off under his own name, which sounds like the smallest of these wounds, Meredith, and I assure you it was not, because a man who will steal your casserole will steal anything, given time and an unlocked recipe box.

You will notice, if you are keeping a tally, that these men have almost nothing in common except this: each of them, at the outset, insisted that a small thing — a cactus, a bird, a hedge, a recipe — was not a big deal. That I was overreacting. That I was reading too much into it. Meredith, I want you to sit with that sentence, because it is the exact sentence in your letter, and it is the exact sentence I heard, in one form or another, every single time, right before the ground opened up beneath me.

So here is what I have learned to do, and what I recommend to you, not as advice exactly but as a kind of architecture. Do not name the dog Gary. Do not name anything after anyone who is not you, ever, for any reason, no matter how charming the justification. I have found that the only truly safe course is to keep your naming rights entirely to yourself, and ideally to keep the rest of your rights to yourself as well. I currently live alone, by design, behind a modest but effective moat I had installed myself two summers ago, and I correspond with the outside world under three separate aliases, each with its own bank account and its own opinions about brunch. I speak to almost no one. My closest ongoing relationships are with a box turtle named Harold, whom I trust completely, because a reptile has never once asked me to name anything after his college roommate, and frankly never will.

I do not say this with bitterness, Meredith. I say it with the quiet satisfaction of a woman who tried the other way for a very long time and finally found the way that works. I am, by any reasonable measure, thriving. I sleep well. I have never once discovered that my ceiling fan had a secret identity. And I want that same peace for you, which is why I urge you, gently but firmly, to hold your ground on this dog.

Learn from my mistakes, Meredith, and you can be exactly as happy as I am.

— Priscilla