Just an interesting side note on this name business. The Province of Quebec in Canada (and only Quebec) has an extraordinarily restrictive policy on name changes. It’s basically that as a resident and under the jurisdiction of the province, you can’t do it, unless there’s an incredibly compelling reason. The consequence of this is that in Quebec, a woman getting married cannot change her last name. It doesn’t matter if she wants to or not. Not allowed. It seems to have something to do with their push for “gender equality” that seems to have gone overboard into the realm of insanity, just like their ridiculous French-only language laws.
That’s fascinating! And wrong-headed, of course.
(But at least gender-neutral wrong, since a man is in an identical position.)
My understanding is that in most countries , married women do not legally change their name. ( In fact, I think it’s really only English speaking countries and Japan where married women legally change their names. ) Which eliminates all the hassles married women who do legally change their name end up with. They may add or use their husband’s name socially as I am sure Quebec women may also do.
I’m in the opposite position - my kid’s have my husband’s name and I didn’t change mine. Any confusion was because I’m pretty obviously white and my children are obviously part Asian. It was never a problem that my last name was different from theirs. I’m sure some people made all sorts of assumptions - but they would have made a lot of them even without different names.
After my first wife and I separated and up until I met my current wife, I had quite a few first dates.
I quickly discovered it was a terrible idea to set up a long activity as a first date. There are bunches of people who I just prefer to not spend hours and hours with.
I recall the “kids match parents’ names” argument as huge in the 1980s. Probably passe today.
Well that’s when many of us got hitched …
Zactly.
My point (that I should have made explicit but I was typing on my phone where every character is painful) was that this might have been a deal for us as folks marrying and birthing kids. While our parents carped at us for even considering embracing this new-fangled idea that women might not simply take hubby’s name. Of course.
It isn’t now, and us recalling our worries then is unhelpful to understanding current practice or current concerns. The OP topic is certainly set in current times, and should be evaluated by current standards. Difficult as it may be for some of us to adopt that unfamiliar persona.
My husband was opposed to the general trend of taking the husband’s name. But I really needed to get rid of my last name, it was a reminder of bad times. And his name is pretty badass. And now my full name is pretty badass, especially compared to the clunkers I had before that. So I’m glad I took his name. It was kinda like a fresh start.
I have friends who did each of those. And honestly, had my father’s name been more interesting, i might have considered those.
Well, I’m working with some Syrian refugees, and they all keep their father’s name for life. They don’t change it when they marry.
This is why coffee dates are so popular for first dates. It’s cheap, it’s a public place, and there aren’t many people so unpleasant that you can’t sit with them long enough to finish a cup of coffee.
Hehe, when my sweetie and I got married, she wanted to take my name, and I wanted to take her name.
It’s not that either of us were reminded of bad times, but both of our given last names are a pain in the ass. If you read my last name and think you know you know how to say it, you are almost certainly wrong. If you hear it and think you know how to spell it, you are almost certainly wrong. Her last name was a common name for an animal, but people’s brains just seem to fritz out when presented with it as a last name, and a crazy number of mispronunciations ensued.
She won out, and now we both have “my” dumb last name. She doesn’t seem to have any regrets. I think we would have both been better off if we had used Throatwarbler Mangrove instead.
You reminded me of another couple, who both changed their names to an entirely new one that they picked. And I also remembered the wife of a friend from uni kept her name. (It’s sad how much we’ve drifted apart as friends move away.)
I also have one friend who has become more feminist since she married and says she wouldn’t change her name if she made the choice today. But she isn’t going to go to the trouble and awkwardness of changing back.
Me, my husband, and most of my friends who’ve got married were born in the 80s. And I don’t think much had changed since the older people here married. A few of those friends or their wives kept their names or did something else, but by far the majority of people my age followed convention. Not knowing what to do about the kids’ names is probably a major reason this (sexist) rule has stuck around: many people dislike double-barrelled names, and if you give children their father’s name, it’s not really any less sexist.
But even if there’s no really good solution for that, I didn’t want to continue this tradition, and I don’t see why I should change my name just because I’m a woman. So I didn’t.
I recall an older female relative of my late wife whose family birth name was a mouthful. When she married (1970s?) she adopted her Hub’s last name. When she divorced she didn’t want her old one back, nor to keep Jerky McJerkFace’s name. This was the heyday of one of the Star Wars movies, so she chose “Starwalker” as her post-divorce name. She was quite happy with it.
My late wife’s birth name was also a mouthful. So she took mine when we got married. Mine is shorter, simpler, but objectively not very desirable in any way. But she thought it beat the hand she already held. My take was that, in poker parlance, she traded one pair for two pair; still a losing hand.
We thought about coining something just for us, but given our existing names, it would, like “Starwalker”, have been cut from whole cloth, bearing no relationship to our birth names. And her hyper-traditional mother would have been devastated at the breach of Almighty Tradition. Sigh.
My now ex- second wife was also born with a mouthful of a family name. Upon her first marriage she took her husband’s rather nice simple name. And had two kids also given that family name. She gets divorced, keeps his name for about 10 years, then legally changes it back to her birth name. When I married her a couple decades after that there was no thought on either side of her changing. So she kept her re-adopted birth name. Which worked well for her when we divorced not long after.
And here’s a bit of a surprise … A few years after ex-wife had changed her last name from first husband’s back to her birth name, but before she and I had gotten together, her ~30yo daughter decided to do the same thing. So daughter changed her last name from her father’s simple birth name to her mother’s much more difficult birth name. No marriage involved. Wicked burn there, Girl.
My uncle was active in the civil rights movement (he acted as Martin Luther King’s lawyer for a while, for instance) and was a pillar of his local Jewish community, and the person they went to for advise on complicated moral issues. One of his daughters married a guy who has become a Trumpie. She has three daughters, the youngest of whom married a (female) cantor, and is also very morally engaged.
When the two young women married, they both took my uncle’s last name. They say that’s because it’s easier to spell and pronounce than either of their birth names. And that’s true, my uncle’s last name is certainly much easier than that of my cousin’s husband. But I’m pretty sure that’s not the real reason.
Yes. My last name was ethnic and teachers got it wrong.
When I married, I got the best name ever. You cant misspell it.
If I marry again, I will drop my first name, which I dislike and be lastname, his last name.
My last name is used as a first.
My wife does a lot of traveling for her work, sometimes up to three weeks in a month, but often no trips for a couple of months.
I also have a greater appreciation for what single parent do.
I agree with this. It’s perfectly reasonable to have life goals and to communicate them to potential partners.
As I posted above, I was really happy with my now wife communicated early on that she was interested in a serious relationship that included getting married and having children. Had I not be interested, it would have saved both of us a lot of frustration and potential heartbreaks.
However, the problem is not only with the communication, but also the apparent approach to achieving the goals.
After thinking about this for a couple of days, one thing that stands out is that the woman is demanding a commitment from the guy, but there isn’t anything said about her commitment.
Is she giving herself the same ultimatum, and if so, why doesn’t she phrase it that way? I would have felt very different if she said something like, “I’m looking to be in a committed relationship and engaged within two years.” That’s simply setting a time frame for the progress of the relationship.
If she isn’t giving herself the same ultimatum, is it because she’s already decided based on (???) that he will suffice, or she wants a commitment from him without a similar commitment from herself?
It’s a first date. If she’s already decided he’s marriage material, then the chances are she’s simply looking to get married rather than being careful in the selection process. That would be a deal breaker for me.
If she’s demanding a one-way commitment without committing herself, that’s blatantly unfair and a deal breaker as well.
Sure there is much empty space that we have to fill in with what we each think seems likely to actually be.
I don’t see a scenario like that as a very likely reality, assuming there is an actual reality.
Although I do know of couples who decided they wanted to marry each other on a first date. My oldest sister and her husband of nearly 50 years for one. Came home from the date and announced it. My mom immediately suggested that maybe they at least live together a bit first? But still married, two kids, multiple grandchildren. She later stopped talking to we siblings and mom (dad dead by then) but she’s still with him. So not impossible to know right off.
But to be clear. She is not demanding commitment from him now. She is demanding that it is there if they are still dating at a future two year mark for any relationship to continue past then. Until then no commitment required.
Ref the last couple of posts.
It seems pretty obvious, but also implicit, that what she really means is something close to
- By two years we’ll either have broken up if we’re not succeeding together. OR we’ll still be together, and at that point I’ll be wanting to get married to you promptly. If I’m not so inclined, I’ll have already broken us up. I expect that if you’re not so inclined, you’ll have broken us up.
But I also know most men like to avoid commitment forever. Fair warning: I don’t work that way. I will not do “kick the can down the road” indefinitely, like I suspect you would want to. Two years is shit or get off the pot. Unless either of us has already broken up of course, then the 2 years is moot.
If she’d lost interest in him after 1 date, 1 month, or 6 months, she’d be gone. He’d presumably do the same if he was really disinterested in her.
The whole and entire gotcha she’s legitimately trying to manage is that men will “go steady”, maybe even cohabit, indefinitely with somebody they have zero intention of ever marrying, because the men think the woman is not that great a mate, but better than nothing as a GF. Heck, he may still be shopping for her replacement on the side the whole time.
My bottom line:
It seems to me there’s no reason for her to have to explicitly state all the caveats and get-out clauses that inherently apply to both of them. Logically, the only way the two year limit doesn’t apply to her is if he does propose just shy of 2 years and she says “Wait, lemme think about that 6 months”. Or, “No thanks, but lets cohabit” or “No thanks, let’s just stay BF/GF UFN”. In which case the guy learned something about GF’s commitment to her claims. And he might choose to walk over that learning. Or not.
Nobody is legally bound by any terms here. It’s all just planning information.
Well, I’m even more out of practice than you, but the way I would do it is to see if we were compatible on the first date, and if we were, ask about thoughts about marriage on dates 2 or 3 or 4. And about money. And maybe sex.
I’d be fine if she said that she wanted to get married someday. Could be a good test. But let’s not set the date before she knows the color of his underwear.
I’m fine with a guy not wanting to get married being a deal breaker. But no one should even be thinking about this with regard to a particular person on a first date. Why not learn enough about each other to determine if it even makes sense to get married? The guy could be awful about money. The guy could be a cheater. The guy could leave his socks on the floor.
When you interview a job candidate, you don’t ask for a commitment to work until retirement before you know if they can even do the job. That’s all I’m saying.
It sounds like, to her according to our available information, that marriage willingness is the most important feature of a man. That’s dumb.
But if your goal is getting married, this is what you will be thinking about on all your dates. If a man is marriage-phobic and marriage is your goal, getting it out in the open early is smart in my mind.
But this whole thread is based on fakey people and fakety click-bait, so consider the source.