Why does my iPhone show "Maybe" in Contacts for my wife's name?

Did you ever find a fix for this? I’m having the same problem.

Also on ios 18. Also logged in and out of icloud. Tweaked all the Siri settings. Deleted and re-added contact.

Nothing has worked. Still showing “maybe” and “to you & <contact name>” on the notification.

I have this exact same issue. Also happens with my wife, who has been in my contacts for many years. This only happens on my phone. My other devices are unaffected. I have also tried various other fixes and none have worked.

Very clearly a bug in iOS 18. Pretty frustrating for a core feature like this to working incorrectly.

Same exact issue. Only happening with my wife. Weird thing is that it just started for me this week when she had to go travel for work out of state. I’ve been on io18 since June and it’s been fine.

nine of the solutions in here have worked.

additionally about a month ago an entire year of mine and my wife’s messages history just disappeared from the phone. It’s still visible on my Mac so I know it’s in iCloud but the phone is not showing it anymore.

some bizzare behavior since updating to io18

Follow up to myself.

I finally found a “fix”.

the other “solutions” in this thread did nothing for me. The comments about iCloud disassociating phone with email got me thinking. So I went into my wife’s contact info and removed her email address. When I went back to the messages app a new second wife thread appeared with all the messages that must have got sent from her email instead of phone number. I just deleted this thread and then re-added her email back to her contact info. Notifications went back to normal.

I do understand that this might not be a good solution to some people though if the number of messages send from email is large and includes messages that you don’t want to lose but I was lucky that there was only a couple that got separated out and none were anything important or save worthy.

I fixed it for me (at least for now).

The only way to preserve message history is if you have your messages in iCloud.

First I removed the contacts email from their contact.

I then disabled iCloud messages on my phone. This allows me to delete conversations while keeping the originals in iCloud.

Then I deleted the conversion with the person in question.

I reenabled iCloud messages. This loaded back two conversations into my messages app. The conversations were still broken. I then blocked the email address for the removed email.

I then disabled iCloud messages, deleted both of the now separated conversions. I then reenabled iCloud messages.

I then unblocked the email and re-added it to the persons contact.

Not sure how much of this was necessary or not. The person was periodically messaging me throughout this process.

So (with the help of Apple support rep) I was able to find a solution, at least for my situation. With the latest upgrades to Siri in ios18, it’s pulling data from more apps. In this case, WhatsApp (which typically uses a phone number as ID) was the cause. Navigate to app settings, disable “Learn from this app” under “Apple intelligence and Siri”.

Check this setting in any app that might be using the same email or phone number as iMessage.

The bug seems to be that the phone is not properly associating the contact's iMessage phone number with the name on the contact card, so avoiding the "Maybe" suggestion is actually a red herring: that just results in the contact's phone number being displayed in the notification instead. It gets sent "To you & (name associated with contact's iMessage email address)" because there are often iMessages in the chat history that used the email instead of the number. In other words, in the notification only and only with iMessages (not SMS), iOS 18 seems to have broken the association of the contact's iMessage phone number with the contact name bearing that number, but it hasn't broken the association of the contact's iMessage email address with that name. So it thinks there's a mystery number sending a message to you and to the contact's own name. It's maddening but weirdly I'm not experiencing it on my laptop, iPad, or Apple Watch -- only on my iPhone.

See related thread here, which is what's happening when it's not yet suggesting "Maybe" + contact's name:

Contact is displayed as number, and is se… - Apple Community

Same exact issue, just woke up and it started happening. Clearly, this is a bug on apple’s end, I’ve already notified them, hopefully this gets resolved as it’s absolutely obnoxious and for the last 10 months, there has been ongoing issues with iMessage, including losing messages Which iOS 18 just fixed and now this .

This is also happening to me. I’ve tried deleting the contact, all the messages, disassociating Siri with WhatsApp, and nothing works. Frustratingly, this only happens with my husband which is the person I contact the most!

It’s up to the AI to determine who a contact might be if they are not already saved to Contacts, thus showing "Maybe:" in front of a contact's name.

Here's how to remove maybe from iPhone contacts.

1. On your iPhone, open Settings.
2. Tap Contacts.
3. Tap Siri & Search.
4. Toggle off Show Contact Suggestions.

Question: given that so many responses here are having problems with their wife’s contact…do you guys use iCloud family sharing? I am experiencing the same issue and the only thing that’s changed was adding my wife to my family’s iCloud so she could share my storage subscription.

I'm experiencing the same problem and now it is happening in reverse to another one of my contacts. She is on IOS 18.1 and when I text here now it says Maybe: You and Andrew.

I have tried all of the suggestions in this thread and nothing has worked. It was fine in IOS 17.x this has only happened since IOS 18.x upgrade.

I also have an issue where no notifications are received in Apple Car Play unless I'm on the Car Play screen. These bugs need to be fixed as it is very frustrating.

I was just on the phone with Apple Support for over an hour and they told me that it is a bug. They also advised me to file a bug report for Contacts at Apple.com/feedback so their dev team can be aware of it. They also encouraged others who are having this issue to also file a report so Apple can address this sooner - so please take a minute to file one if you can! Thank you!

This problem has gotten even worse for me. My husband has 2 phone numbers and even when I try to text his personal number it automatically shows as going to his work phone. I’ve tried blocking his work number and texts he sends to me from his personal phone still show as coming from his work phone. When I type in his personal phone number with iMessage on, it automatically thinks I’m texting his work phone and fills in his name (even though I’ve deleted the number and blocked the contact). I’ve also turned off Siri learning for Contacts, WhatsApp, and whatever I can turn it off for.

This is beyond frustrating! I really hope it can get fixed soon