Why People Choose Partners with Similar Names?  

Is it just a coincidence that these happy couples all have names that are similar? Do people marry people whose first names are similar to their own? If so, does this phenomenon still occur today or was it more prevalent decades ago? Personality and social psychologists agree that things, places, and people that are like themselves attract people. "Implicit egotism" is a common term for this tendency. The name-letter effect says that people are more likely to like someone who shares their first name. For instance, a man named Robert might be more attracted to Rachel or Roberta women, whereas a woman named Amy might be more likely to date an Andrew than a James. According to the researchers, people's positive, automatic associations about themselves are triggered by this similarity. "My grandfather's name was Vern, and he married a woman named Verna," one user wrote. “Before she passed away, they had been together for more than 30 years. After that, he wed Elvira. That's them and Nora, their great-granddaughter, to the right. They remained together for twenty more years.” The Belgian psychologist Jozef Nuttin (1933–2014) was the first to discover the name-letter effect in 1985. He found that people preferred letters in their first or last names, such as their initials. Later research, published in 1987, tested the extent to which this phenomenon transcended national borders and found that speakers of 12 different European languages were affected by the name-letter effect.

How do preferences for particular letters influence my life choices?

John Jones et al. looked at marriage records in 2004 to see how name-letter preference affected people's choice of partners. The study looked at data from two databases of marriages in different states in the United States and found that spouses' surnames were correlated, suggesting that we find partners with names that are similar to our own. According to Jones et al. (2004), women with the surname Smith, for instance, were more likely to date and eventually marry men with the same last name.

Read more about names on https://journal.nameslexicon.com/naming-your-child

Place Name Preferences

The name-letter effect has been shown to have an impact on decisions that go beyond choosing a mate; it can also help us choose where we want to live. According to a study of the relationship between people's personal names and the names of the places they chose to live, we typically prefer places with names that are similar to our own. For instance, the researchers discovered that a disproportionately high number of women with the surname Virginia chose to reside in Virginia Beach. Although similar effects can be observed in many of our choices, they rarely have any practical application. However, charitable giving was noted as an exception to this. In an experiment with graduates of Utrecht University, Bekkers (2009) found that donors were more likely to give when approached by someone with a similar name or whose first names were similar to the university's name. Because of this, the study's author suggested that telephone-based charity workers adopt the name-letter effect in an effort to boost donations (Bekkers, 2009). So indeed, people really do favor/love other people with similar names. That is in no way wrong or shameful. Go ahead, as long as you've found someone special to be your friend and someone you love!

Read more about names on https://journal.nameslexicon.com/naming-your-child