Embarrassing name? How we live with names we don't like

As a child growing up in Australia, Louise Pain hated her surname.

"People used to tease me; I was called things like 'Pain in the a*s,'" she told DW. "I remember actively hating my surname when I was a child and wanting to change it."

The jokes have followed her throughout her life, even after she moved to Germany. But one thing did eventually change: Pain's feelings about her own name.

Names are not only a fundamental part of how we identify ourselves — they can, beyond teasing, also influence how other people treat us. So, what happens if we dislike our own name — or if it is perceived negatively by those around us? 

"A person's name is vital to their sense of identity," psychoanalyst Mikita Brottman told DW. "When someone has an embarrassing name, that embarrassment can be incorporated into their identity."

Research on name bias has linked negatively perceived names with romantic rejection,

as well as lower educational outcomes, lower self-esteem and more frequent smoking.

This suggests that names could influence our life trajectory, namely through self-esteem and opportunity. 

But a person's relationship with their name is not necessarily fixed. Pain's lived experience, and that of another woman with the first name Tiny, shows how people can find ways to reclaim, and even come to value, names that once triggered ridicule and rejection.

How do names shape first impressions

Names can act as "signals" when you first meet someone, personality psychologist Jochen Gebauer told DW. Those signals may lose importance as people get to know each other, but Gebauer said their effects could also accumulate over a lifetime, potentially contributing to "real measurable advantages and disadvantages."

"Your name couldn't possibly be Pain. Write your real name!" she recalled the teacher saying.

'Weirdness': Why people react negatively to some names

In Lee's UK-based research, less familiar names tended to fall along a dimension partly characterized as "weirdness," which may help explain why difficult-to-pronounce or culturally unfamiliar names receive more negative evaluations. 

Tiny, now 54, encountered the same questions about her unfamiliar name growing up in Greece.

Her parents had adapted "Tiny" to "Tinie" to make it sound more Greek, but people would repeatedly ask what her real or baptismal name was.

Even relatives have refused to accept it. Recently, two elderly aunts introduced her to someone as "Haritini," a conventional Greek name.

"I didn't even bother correcting them at this point," Tiny told DW. 

Tiny's relationship with her name has also evolved.

"The jokes [from others] got repetitive and boring pretty fast, so at least I was left with the sense that I have something unique with my name going on."

Pain, now 41, discovered how much cultural context could change the reaction to her surname when she began learning her father's native French as a teenager. In French, 'pain' means bread.

"People started calling me 'Bread! Louise Bread.'"

Later, after moving to Germany, the jokes became mostly bread-related rather than the more scathing ones she had experienced in Australia. "That helped me to feel better about my name," she said.

How humor helps — and harms — as a coping mechanism

As they got older, both Pain and Tiny developed coping strategies to pre-empt people's reactions to their names.

Tiny sometimes introduces herself with: "Hi, I'm Tiny. It's my name and not a statement," or, "I'm Tiny. Not a difficult name to live up to."

"This usually stops people from asking awkward questions."

Pain also began to embrace the humor surrounding her name. 

"I was convinced that I should become either a doctor or a dominatrix, or perhaps both, to become either 'Doctor Pain,' or 'Mistress Pain.'"

How an embarassing name can also offer a sense of belonging

"Names can conjure that whole spectrum of shame and pride," psychoanalyst Melissa Daum told DW.

Pain now finds that people tend to see her surname as "funny and endearing… it's become something that is more of a funny talking point," she said.

But the childhood discomfort has not entirely disappeared. When Pain thinks about having children, her feelings about the name become more complicated. 

"I don't really want to pass on my surname ... so there is a deeper wound there."

But Pain also believes her father would be deeply hurt if future children had a different name. The surname she once hated connects her to him and to her French heritage.

"Something that once feels like an inconvenience or a source of self-consciousness can become a marker of distinctiveness, history, or belonging," Daum said.

Tiny describes a similar ambivalence. 

"My parents seemingly made an unfortunate choice, but by now I have embraced both the name and the sense of uniqueness that comes with it."

That does not mean she uses Tiny everywhere. She avoids it on dating apps because "Tiny might give off the wrong message" and does not use it in her email address when she wants to appear professional.

Pain, meanwhile, uses a Germanized version of the French word for bread as her social media surname.

Online, people have more control over what name they present to others. As Daum put it: "Choosing one's own name can feel like an act of mastery, even a refusal of that original passivity: I will decide what I am called and how I am encountered."

But accepting a name does not necessarily mean embracing it in every situation.

Pain once wanted to change her surname. Tiny considered using her middle name in her thirties. Neither ultimately abandoned the names that had caused them difficulties.

For Tiny, at least, a name that once made her feel awkward has become something she can imagine carrying for the rest of her life.