I met a woman in a bar once and we really hit it off, ending up at her place.
I went to work the next day and realized I couldn’t remember her name. She had given me her number, it was there in my flip phone (this was a while back) but no name.
I called people who were at the bar where we met, but nobody knew her name. “Oh yeah, she’s cute, don’t know her”. I remembered details she had mentioned and tried finding out her name, but got nowhere. I called her to chat, but she didn’t give any clues and there was never a need for me to say her name.
The next time we went out I tried to get her to show me her drivers license, showing mine first and commenting on the lousy picture. She wouldn’t show her license, adamantly refusing, which was really strange. I thought maybe she knew my predicament and was torturing me.
Turns out she didn’t want me to see how young she was. I didn’t know her name until the fourth time we were at her place and I happened to see some mail. I later learned she was half my age and I ended the crazy relationship.
My grandmother had three boys: my father and my two uncles. My father, in turn, had two boys: me and my brother. Anytime she would call anyone of us, she would go through all five names, invariably finding the correct one last. Things got even worse when she got a dog (which was male, too :dubious:). Her struggles provided us kids with lots of fun.
Now, I get the names of my two daughters mixed up :o.
My mom was the oldest of eleven children (8 girls and 3 boys). I’ve personally witnessed her going through the names of all seven of her sisters before getting my sister’s name right. And now that my sister has two daughters of their own, they’ve been added to the shared name pool, too (mostly, them being called by their mother’s name).
I sometimes get called the name of my oldest uncle, and have occasionally gotten the other two also, but I don’t have it nearly as bad as my sister does.
My brother and I used to pretend-fight, close to my great-grandma’s chair (but out of reach of her whackin’ cane). The loser of the game was the one whose name she remembered first.
“You children, cut that out! Bobby…Cathy…Danny…JIM!”
I moved early while my wife stayed in the old house for the school year to end. As a joke, when we were living together again, she said “good night” and I said “good night Becky” - not her name. I knew no one named Becky. Over the next few months two neighbors, team mom for soccer, room mom for kindergarten class - all named Becky - crossed our social paths.
I think she still wonders about that. But we are still married 25 years later.