Oh, dear
◊ Nicknames are inevitable.
My own name has been pretty safe as far as nicknames go; you can't really twist "Arlette" into anything especially derogatory. The closest anyone got was someone calling me "Ar-lut," "lut" meaning "slut" in the "Sark" slang she and her friends used. She was jealous because I'd hooked up with a guy she had a crush on.
As a nickname, it failed miserably. It made sense to such a limited group that it just didn't work as an insult. It was inaccurate, to boot. I'd only slept with or fooled around with two people, including this guy, so I was a spectacular failure at being a slut. A nickname like that was just too silly to take seriously.
Anything else I picked up was the generic cute stuff you get during a relationship. My first boyfriend and I called each other "love," though he said it with a bad Cockney accent and sounded like something from My Fair Lady. Dan and I stuck to the basics, calling each other "sweetie" and "honey."
I call my current boyfriend "Dirtbag," mostly because he yells "Sappy!" or starts booing when I hit him with anything too mushy. He calls me "Fuckface" and I think it's awfully sweet, a bit weird and very funny, much like the man himself.
But I'm told it's not enough. He says we need nicknames for when we're having sex.
Now, I've never been much into saying a lover's name during the act. I'm almost afraid to, out of fear that my mom's inability to remember names might be genetic. During my childhood and well into my teens, whenever she was trying to find one of the kids, she'd start yelling a string of names until she hit the right one. My mom's version of directing a call to one of us was to set the phone down and bellow "LINDA-AMBER-ARLETTE!" at top volume and hope the right one showed up.
I don't think a laundry list of names would go over well in bed.
That fear, plus a general inability to talk dirty, means that I usually stick to moaning. When I do say someone's name I pause first, composing a sentence and reciting the person's name a couple of times in my head. I want to make very, very sure that I'm not going to say a talk show host's or famous author's name instead.
I have issues enough with just saying a name; keeping track of a nickname to use during sex sounds daunting.
My boyfriend makes some valid points. He says "Arlette" is too much to say during the act and that a one-syllable name would be much easier. I was skeptical until I remembered that when things are going well, he can't even spit out a complete generic expression of pleasure like "Holy shit." It usually trails off into a weak "Holy ..." followed by some eye-rolling. A one-syllable name would sound much more dignified than half of a longer nickname.
I plugged different options into the "Oh, [insert nickname here]" equation, but I couldn't come up with anything I liked. I hate having people contract "Arlette," so modifications of my name were right out. All the cute stuff was too long and too, well, cute. "Dirtbag" and "Fuckface" were too Fight Club and would make me crack up.
So I turned it around. Maybe the thing to do was pick a nickname from what we already call each other in bed. Whenever one of us says "Oh," we have to follow it up with something.
And I got it. We'd been calling each other by the same name all along.
I'm just glad these are bed-only nicknames, because I don't think I could keep a straight face if we introduced each other to strangers as "Fuck."
Though I think I'd like being called "God."