Tristan

He drank the wrong cup and never entirely recovered. The Celtic hero of the medieval Tristan and Isolde romance — a Cornish knight who swallows a love potion intended for his uncle's bride and cannot survive the consequences — carried a name likely Pictish in origin, one the French poets who retold the story heard through the lens of triste, sadness, pressing the name's sound into perfect alignment with its theme. Wagner's 1865 opera made the whole story operatic in the most literal possible sense; the 1994 film Legends of the Fall sent the name into American birth records with considerable cinematic weight attached.

Tristan now sits at rank 267 in the United States, past its early-2000s peak but holding with genuine steadiness — the name of a constituency rather than a trend, which is its own kind of durability. No modern celebrity's shadow dominates it so completely that it cannot be fully reclaimed by whoever wears it next.

Two syllables — TRIS-tan — the first compressed and consonant-heavy, the second opening slightly like something beginning to breathe or arrive. It pairs naturally beside Warren or Lukas in a sibling set; Steven or Omar alongside it would carry a usefully different register — the medieval Celtic and the classical or Arabic, each weighted with their own centuries. The man named Tristan has usually thought more carefully about loyalty than most people he knows, has opinions about medieval literature he shares only when directly asked, and is going to be fine. He just needed to put the cup down and find his own direction. He is working on it.