It’s easy to pick up habits from romantic partners. People who are attracted to each other often engage in mirroring, or subconsciously copying each other’s gestures and patterns of speech. It’s also common for people in relationships to adopt each other’s attitudes, behaviors, and hobbies. Personally, it’s how I learned to sail, rock climb and develop an appreciation for the finer points of noise music and puppetry.

Since the musician Grimes started dating tech mogul Elon Musk, many critics have noted — or complained — that she seems to be mirroring the billionaire CEO behind SpaceX and Tesla in both form and content. In their first appearance as a couple at the Met Gala earlier this month, Grimes wore a choker co-designed by Musk that looked a lot like a Tesla logo, inspiring numerous memes. She also reportedly removed (and later readded) the word “anti-imperialist” from her Twitter bio.

Elon Musk and Grimes make their debut at the Met Gala pic.twitter.com/plAvt2xvc6 — despite your efforts you cannot escape pajamashaw (@pajamashaw) May 8, 2018

Yesterday, the question of his influence was raised again when Grimes announced that she had decided change her name to c, the scientific symbol for the speed of light.

i’m legally changing my name from claire to ‘c’ , as in the speed of light. {☄️ lowercase and italics } ___ this will be much better pic.twitter.com/nOG5kNEU9O — Grimes (@Grimezsz) May 17, 2018

Fans who are attached to her stage name need not worry; the change will instead make her legal name c Boucher instead of Claire Boucher. The c is lower-case and italicized, as per the scientific notation for how quickly light can move in a vacuum. According to Grimes, or as I now like to think of her, 3.00 × 108 m/s, Musk encouraged the change, prompting headlines that the decision was “because of” or “thanks to” him. But as Grimes noted on Twitter, she had considered her given name Claire “the bane of [her] existence since [she] became sentient,” in part because of a speech impediment, and had long wanted to change it. “C” was already her nickname among friends, she says, and Musk simply pointed out that she need look no further for a new appellation.

Their romance has sparked criticism from Grimes fans, particularly those who see a conflict with an “anti-imperialist” artist who once wrote a feminist manifesto dating a multi-billionaire whose company has been accused of intimidating union workers, exploiting foreign workers, anti-gay harassment, racial harassment, creating an environment of sexual harassment described as a “predator zone,” and firing a woman who spoke out. Musk has said that he “cannot be happy” without a romantic partner, and previously dated actor Amber Heard after divorcing his first wife, Justine Musk, in 2008. Justine Musk later wrote that he had declared himself “the alpha in this relationship” during their wedding reception, told her that she “read too much,” and pressured her to dye her hair platinum blond. In 2016, as reported by Verge writer Sarah Jeong on Motherboard, Musk followed 21 men on Twitter but no women. Musk responded by calling the the critique “phoney PC police axe-grinding” and quickly followed GQ writer Caity Weaver. He currently follows two women, including Grimes.

While this is certainly enough to earn Grimes a “you in danger, girl” warning from her friends, it also doesn’t strip her of agency — especially when it comes to the idiosyncratic artist making idiosyncratic decisions, like naming herself after a universal constant. It’s worth noting that Grimes was a huge nerd long before her current relationship, fond of streaming Bloodborne on Twitch, writing songs about Al Pacino as a gender-fluid AI, and dropping references to Trigun and Dark Souls in her music videos. Earlier this year she interviewed Lana del Rey about traveling to Mars and whether artificial intelligence is “good or bad for humanity.” Even more nerdily, Grimes and Musk originally crossed paths in a Twitter meet cute because of a shared interest in Roko’s Basilisk, a thought experiment involving a lizard king, the singularity and time travel. (Grimes appeared as a character called “Rococo Basilisk” in her video for the single “Flesh without Blood.)

Despite the confusion, contempt and declarations from fans that their relationship proves that we are living in a simulation, Grimes seems to be reacting to it all with humor. When a Twitter user posted a joke conversation between Grimes and Musk that imagined her as a cat with glowing eyes speaking in bursts of static, Grimes called it “accurate” in a follow-up tweet of her own. “It’s p good i relate 2 this cat,” she wrote.