My name is so common my husband even dated someone with the same name before meeting me

• My name is Emily and I was named after my grandmother.
• My mom said that people tend to like an Emily and she secretly wished that was her name.

The other day, it finally happened: I ended up on an email chain at work where I had to connect one Emily to another Emily to do this or that. It started out “Dear Emily," and I signed it, “Best regards, Emily." Shortly after I hit send, it struck me that the moment I had been dreading since I was but a wee Emily myself had come: the age of Emily was upon us.

It’s often repeated that people love to hear their own name spoken out loud to them. But when your name was the No. 1 girl's name in the United States between 1996 and 2007, and you now share it with roughly 802,000 people in America, there will be feelings.

Call it the John Smithification of naming: What was once a distinctive, literary-leaning name with nuanced shades of meaning has started to feel common and empty.

I was named after my grandmother

For three decades I’ve asked my mother, a Susan, how I ended up an Emily. She has always told me she named me after her mother, Emily Jean, but last week she finally revealed to me that she had actually wanted to be an Emily.

“What’s not to like about Emily?” she said.

So this is the first thing you need to understand about Emilys — they were named to be liked.

If Karen has become a catchall for the entitled white woman with a few words for your customer service rep, Emily is tailored for the social media age — an ebullient try-hard maintaining a sweetness of demeanor and an air of general enthusiasm while pursuing her secret plans to get what she wants.

This could be why half of the public relations professionals I interacted with last week share my name — Emilys often self-select into communications jobs.

I didn’t grow up with the albatross of likeability. The Emilys of my youth were dreamy, far-off figures — bookish role models and lifestyle influencers before such a thing existed.

There are Emilys everywhere

First there was Emily Dickinson, arguably the Ur-Emly, with her enviable routine: “Woke up, saw no one, wore white.” Her preferences for privacy, solitude, and a life of the imagination still float in the air whenever I hear someone yell: “Emily!” in the grocery store.

And then there was the Emily Bartlett, of Beverly Cleary’s "Emily’s Runaway Imagination" — a farm girl who makes mistakes (for shame, Emily!) but whose overall drive is virtuous — to bring a branch library to her rural community.

But the biggest Emily in my life, by shelf real estate, came in the form of the navy doorstop of "Emily Post’s Etiquette." In my family, we actually consulted her — even if she counseled women to keep their witty remarks to themselves.

Emily may mean “industrious, eager, ” but what I took from her is that to be an Emily (Emily Ratjakowski excluded) is to be a rule follower — at least publicly.

I didn’t meet another Emily until late elementary when I encountered Emily Good in my ballroom dancing class, with her blond ringlets and patent leather shoes. Good luck Googling her, by the way — I counted 88 Emily Goods on LinkedIn alone.

Obviously, I hated her — she was even more of an Emily than I was.

I did a little better with other Emilys — a middle school Emily who kind of looked like me, or my first cool Emily, in the sandwich shop where I worked.

My husband dated an Emily before me

But once I joined the media world, they were everywhere — on all the magazine mastheads, in my ear as NPR reporters, sitting behind news desks, getting nominated for Oscars (Emma Stone is actually Emily, by the way).

Within a decade, there were so many Emilys that I started to feel like “Agent Smith” in the Matrix, except we are all eager white ladies circling back next week.

Too many Emilys means that most Emilys have considered a rebrand. I’ve thought of this myself — maybe changing my name to Emmy (my family nickname) or dropping the “ily” in favor of instant relatability (see stylist Em Henderson).

By the way, my husband’s first serious girlfriend was also an Emily. Charitably, he refers to her only by her last name, like a sports announcer.

But lately, I have been longing to find nuance in Emily, where popularity and likeability have washed away my early associations. So, I’ve tasked myself with identifying a plural form for that moment when I discover several Emilys in one room.

I asked my Facebook friends, and they suggested: embargo, engagement, ensemble, eloquence, exuberance, electorate, eminence, or enchantment.

But I’m leaning toward something that gets at what it’s like when you’re finally enough of your own Emily that you can see yourself as part of a sneaker wave of ambitious and imaginative women enacting their big, beautiful plans at every level of society.

A delight of Emilys.

Emily Grosvenor is the author of the book "Find Yourself at Home," and writes the Substack newsletter ★ I would do it differently. ★.