If a man named Jake ever asks you on a date, you should know what you’re in for. Names are important. Not to me, really, but to Gemma. She says she can tell a lot about a person from their name.
There are good names, hot names, cute names, ugly names, names that bore, names that imply raunchy bathroom sex, names hinting at vegetarian tendencies, and names with the potential for a crippling, overbearing mother-in-law one day. I’m sure the list goes on because it’s not really a list. It’s just however the name makes her feel in the moment, what it reminds her of, or the possibility hiding between the letters and the sound they make combined on the tip of her tongue.
Every time I meet someone who has an inkling of potential, and by that I mean someone who looks like they’re too busy for me and has chiseled facial features, I text Gemma to see if I’m in the clear. She usually responds with warning signs, but every once in a while I get the green light.
Michael . . . sounds a little boring, doesn’t it?
Jon . . . def will have a dad bod someday.
Eric . . . oh damn, that’s an extremely cute name GO FOR IT.
I consider the tarot-card–like advice and place my bets accordingly. Once, I fostered a crush on said Eric for an entire year after conversing with him for under two minutes at a pop-up tiki bar. Blond hair, blue eyes, biceps, and a name dreamier than his LinkedIn photo? These are hard to come by.
So recently Gemma started going on dates with a twenty-seven-year-old named Jake and the whole world seems off. Here’s what we thought about the name Jake at first: nothing.
It never crossed our mind. It was a name floating in the sea of names, one perhaps used to describe the man wearing jeans and a sweatshirt watching TV in one of those cheesy ads plastered on the side of the bus stop. Someone drew a mustache in Sharpie on fake Jake and I laugh at it on my way to work every day.
But now, after two dates, Gemma can’t stop thinking about this plain-named creature. At my apartment, I scroll through Instagram as she sits scrunched up in the corner of the couch, studying his name. She writes it down on paper in cursive and in print. She types it in the notes section of her phone and says it out loud a few times in different octaves. She googles it; looks up the etymology of “Jake” (early twentieth century: of unknown origin) and then searches for historical, legal, and religious references as well.
“Did you see Jana is engaged?” I say. It’s the third rock glimmering in my feed so far this week.
“Who?” Gemma says, distracted.
“Jana, that friend of Gina’s.”
“Gina, who’s obsessed with Jenga?”
“Yeah, so weird. I don’t know why she wants to play it every pregame.”
“Yeah, so strange.”
“Want to see the ring?” I say, hoping it will break her hypnosis.
“How big?”
“Big.” I shove the phone in Gemma’s face and she glances for a second and agrees, but then goes back to googling millionaires named Jake.
I sigh, letting my thumb roam free again as she reads me an article about a man named Jake from Louisiana who discovered dinosaur bones under his back porch.
It started out fun. It was fun to look at the profile pictures this Jake guy decided to upload: him standing on a porch with a beer, him huddling with a group of men in suits, him as a tiny speck swinging at a microscopic golf ball. It was fun to hear about the first date, where he pronounced the L in “tortilla chips” because he thought it was a hilarious thing to do. And even fun to dissect the second date, where he took Gemma to a restaurant called Jake’s because he passed it one day and had to go in.
But usually Gemma, the girls, and I go on a few dates and that’s it. We chat about them, give the boys and scenarios names. We cry together, laugh together, and then something happens to stop the trajectory, to put an end to the story. For example, once I dated an architect who wouldn’t let me in his bed unless I showered first. (This raised questions for our group about cleanliness, OCD, controlling behaviors, white sheets, and where to buy the softest towels without breaking the bank.) On our third date, encouraged by the group discourse, I refused to shower just to see what would happen and fin, finale, ende. The fledgling relationship shattered over an argument about the potential of mascara smudges on pristine paper-like pillowcases.
Or take, for example, the time Gemma went on a date with a guy she met at a coworker’s birthday party. He licked her ear not once, not twice, but three times over the course of the evening. (This provoked deep discussions on sensuality, the senses in general, and, of course, tear-inducing jokes about licking in general.) RIP Ear Licker. We will never forget you.
But with this new boring-name guy, the story hasn’t run its course yet. It’s been a whole month and I’ve been waiting for the situation to fold in on itself. Gemma doesn’t find the name “Jake” attractive at all, but she does find this particular human form of Jake attractive and so the dates continue even though I point out this unfortunate tension as often as I can.
When she begins stress-eating leftover Halloween candy in the kitchen at work, she texts me and I try to console her by telling her a name can be changed. Instead, Gemma brainstorms names for their future kids that will combat their father’s inadequacy. My phone blows up with options like “Persephone” and “Zander.” Besides, she says, by then I’ll be able to reference him as Dad or Daddy anyway, so everything will be totally fine.
Don’t you already call him daddy? I respond.
She doesn’t text back for a full two hours.
As I scrub down my kitchen, Gemma perches on a chair and rehashes her latest date with Jake. Their fourth, which is a little bit unbelievable. We’ve officially entered the territory where we can’t just think “nothing” about his name anymore. He can’t just be a name floating in a sea of names because he is becoming a real, human man with each consecutive date that Gemma goes on.
I try to wave the red flags—Only ever orders beer! Watches reruns of Survivor! Thinks Taylor Swift looks like a mouse!—but Gemma shakes her head. She insists he’s unique and that we need to recalibrate the meaning of his name. So after much debate, here’s what we think of now when we hear the name Jake: a real live man who lives in the frattiest, douchebaggiest, young-and-fresh-from-college-est neighborhood of the city with three roommates and no art on the walls. Not one piece.
The real Jake doesn’t have a Sharpie mustache; he has a real one. And ferocious sideburns. When we think of the name Jake now, we think of someone who is extremely loud. Someone who goes to give you a hug and pulls you into a headlock. We think of someone that Gemma should not date.
Nothing adds up but Gemma can’t stop trying to make things work in her mind, which is essentially ruining them in real life, making her do things like fake a sneeze attack every time he starts talking about his dad, who is also named Jake, or use new nicknames that come out wrong.
SOS I just called him sugar pussy, she texted me last week.
I respond with a gif of two monkeys who run into each other and fall off a branch.
On a random Tuesday after work, five of us crowd around my small, wobbly Ikea table and sip fifteen-dollar red wine, calling it a treat because we didn’t go for something under ten. After discussing things like graduate school and siblings and articles we read about the benefits of legalized marijuana, we move on to what everyone was waiting for, the reason we came together for this Tuesday night rendezvous in the first place: boys. B.O.Y.Z.
While walking home from the office earlier, it occurred to me that girls can’t stop talking about boys because other girls can’t stop asking about them. We want to know every detail from whether or not his fingers grazed yours when you walked past the street-meat cart on the way to the subway to . . . Wait, he asked you to take the subway? Did you sit or stand? Did you grab on to him for “balance”?
Sometimes girls ask so many questions about boys, we start making up the answers. Exhibit A:
Girl: He made me tea last night.
Friend: Whoa, that’s big. What kind? Tea reminds me of home.
Girl: Chamomile. And that’s so true, tea is very homey. That’s a good thing, right?
Friend: Definitely. It probably means he wants you to feel at home at his apartment. Did you feel comfortable there?
Girl: (Sits for a moment with visions of moving in together, getting married, and drinking tea for the rest of their lives in front of a gigantic stone fireplace while snow falls lightly outside.) Yeah, I mean I’ve only been to his place once, but now that you mention it, I do feel really comfortable there.
You get the gist. We make up answers and then convince ourselves of their validity. It’s actually a very detailed process, one that only the most sophisticated and intelligent creatures can pull off, which I think is partially why by 2026 over 58 percent of students admitted to college will be female.
Anyway, one of our friends, a blonde with a laugh like a lawnmower, pours more wine. Tell us about Jake, everyone chants and Gemma smiles deviously. I settle back into my chair, and prepare for a story.
Gemma is by far the best storyteller I’ve ever met. When she talks, she puts on a show, accenting sentences or building suspense with pauses that are almost too long but not quite. She raises her jet-black eyebrows in surprise or sucks in her cheeks like a fish. And if it’s a good story, which it usually is because Gemma can turn even the simplest sidewalk run-ins with an ancient high school foe into a gripping tale, then she does not limit herself to sitting but rises to the occasion, literally, by which I mean she stands.
Gemma takes a sip of her wine, pats her cotton-candy lips together with a smack smack, clears her throat, and starts off a little timid, not wanting to give Jake that much space in the conversation. She has to pretend, at least at first, that she isn’t interested in this not-attractively-named person even though she told me about their fifth date over the phone on the way home last night and again when she arrived at my place twenty minutes early today so we could rehash it just the two of us.
“Oh, it was fun, we made dinner at his place,” she says nonchalantly. But it’s enough for the gang to grasp on to, and the can of questions has been opened.
“What did you make?”
“Whoa, he actually has pans at his place?”
Gemma gives us a verbal tour, complete with hand gestures, of the kitchen in Jake’s apartment. It’s long, like a hallway, which is bad for living but good for flirting. Tons of opportunities to accidentally rub arms. There’s a stainless-steel sink and one dish towel that was maybe red at one point but as it currently stands is a pilly, faded, grayish pink.
“One,” Gemma repeats, scrunching her nose while holding up her hands to outline an imaginary dish towel hanging desperately alone. Our imaginations wander, debating when he might have washed it last, if ever, or what has been cleaned up with it, if anything.
But before our minds can spiral too far down a rabbit hole about dish towels, Gemma continues her story, telling us about the wood cabinets and how when she opened them looking for some olive oil for the pasta—yes, they were making pasta with red sauce, Jake’s idea—she found, instead, four canisters of whey protein and remnants of the white powder sitting on the empty shelves like fairy dust. This, the group decides, is classic Jake. Classic! It’s the third time I’ve heard this detail, and something about the way Gemma tells it makes me pull out my phone to tap through apps. I land on a dating one and swipe lazily while I listen along. Private equity, sure. Round head, why not. I finish my wine and accidentally swipe on a man chasing a pigeon, causing my screen to explode in hearts, showing we matched.
“And get this,” Gemma continues, pulling one of her naturally curly hairs straight and letting it slingshot back into place, pausing her sentence for what I think is a little too long before revealing the information that I already know is coming. “When the pasta was done, he only had one bowl, too.”
“One bowl?” someone gasps, and it is pretty shocking, I have to agree.
Gemma juts her chin out and nods.
“One bowl!” she repeats. “And guess what it looked like?”
She cups her hands together to form the shape of a bowl and I don’t doubt that her measurements are probably accurate. Then, she describes it: a ceramic one with wisps of yellow paint and a light blue handprint at the bottom, that of a child. Jake made it with his grandmother when he was five years old and has kept it ever since.
This throws the entire group of analysts off their game. We can’t decide if this is cute or weird. If eating out of one bowl together is romantic or elementary; if keeping a childhood bowl means this boy has a soft spot or a lazy, cheap heart.
As the debate carries on, I glance at Gemma, whose blue eyes sparkle giddily. It’s in moments like these that the whole female-male dynamic becomes lucid, even if just briefly. We’re not interested in boys or dating, but rather in the platform for discussion they provide, the clay for legend building each man enables.
“So, he’s kind of an interesting dude,” someone finally says, breaking our ceramic bowl reveries.
“Yeah, he’s like a dude and a bro at the same time,” someone adds.
“Oh my gosh, you nailed it!” Gemma says, and claps her hands together. “He’s totally a combo. He’s like a dude-bro.”
Cheers emerge as a new category of man is born with Jake as its mascot. The dude-bro: a man who is still raw in his elemental state, one who cooks eggs for dinner and eats them over the kitchen sink, shoveling them from the pan into his mouth after working out. He probably has no idea we’ve spent the last forty minutes of our Tuesday discussing his lack of kitchen utensils. While he’s dominated our conversation, we’re most likely not even a speck in his evening. I wonder if his friends have even asked about Gemma at all.
And as for the ceramic bowl dilemma, the verdict is in: anything would be better than nothing, the analysts decide, especially when that anything is made with love.
Made with love? I think to myself, and stand up to break out the tequila now that the wine is gone. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. But I don’t say it, because we’ve already been discussing this Jake character too long and with each moment his outline gets a bit more filled in. He was just a profile, just a boring name, just a guy Gemma had sex with, but due to our endless efforts and thinking, he might stop being nothing. He might actually become something. The thought is both beautiful and horrifying, so I stay busy mixing drinks, making them strong before passing them out.
As the night fades into endless giggles and muted, unsaid disappointment in the way time passes, we become wobbly drunk, hugging each other just for fun. Music blurs and the ambling conversation veers between discussions about dates the other girls went on and important items in the news like real estate being bought with bitcoin.
Between sips and swipes and giggles with the girls, I look across the table at Gemma and notice she’s texting and smiling. My hands begin to sweat, my stomach churns: it must be Jake.
I take a sip of my not-very-mixed mixed drink and open my phone again. The dating apps show me thousands of men and I swipe and swipe and sip and swipe. I’m looking for a Gerald or, better yet, a Tim. Someone unexpected, or overly expected. Someone who could wreck my year in just one night. Or even a drab lawyer might do.
Each time I look up, I see Gemma smirking like she’s carrying a secret. I didn’t realize how far into the deep end we’d moved. I begin to swipe faster. I can feel her slipping away. Getting further from me even though we’re in the same room, even though I get up and go sit on her lap.
She’s here but she’s on her way somewhere else, I can feel it. And as she teeters on the diving board above a pool of normalcy that, according to Instagram, is our fate, we’re going to need backup.
I swipe right on everyone now, because of the tequila, or because of that dreamy look Gemma still has even though we’re discussing dental procedures. I swipe right on Ben, Jerome, Harold, Keetz, Jared, Robert, Moe.
My thumb works on overdrive because I need to find someone that will bring us back next week. Because every face on the phone has something we can work with. More names to read into, more dates to debate, more problems to create so we can keep solving and solving and solving them together.
Just us girls. Just me and the girls. Just us, forever. 
Charlee Dyroff is a writer from Boulder, Colorado. She received an MFA from Columbia University, and her work has appeared in Gulf Coast, Lapham’s Quarterly, Guernica, The Best American Food Writing 2019, and elsewhere. Her novel, The Most Human Thing, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.
