I think y’all are being too hard on the OP not coming back. It could be that she was injured in a skiing accident. She’s now a quadriplegic and using text to speech software. Also, she has…“followers”.
It was an absolute dealbreaker for me but I didn’t ‘raise a stink’. Am I allowed to have dealbreakers? Part of my decision was that the name she wanted to keep wasn’t even her real name. It was a Japanese looking pass-name. And if she was marrying a Japanese guy she wouldn’t have asked to keep ‘her’ name. So I wasn’t going to be complicit in the perpetuation of racism.
Yes, I apologize. I jumped on you for no reason - not sure why I felt it necessary to use that snarky tone. Sorry!
ETA: For what it’s worth, if my original last name (I hate the term “maiden name”) had been something comical/hard to spell or pronounce while my husband’s was straightforward and simple, he would have totally understood changing my name for that reason.
This ! I feel the same way about this being a power move . My family is Jewish and a niece had a fiancé who is Catholic . The guy told my niece he wanted to raise their kids Catholic and she said “OK” My mom told me this and I told mom "Oh boy it not going to stop with this " Mom called me back and said the fiancé had just told X all the things he doesn’t like about she just before the wedding ! My niece was left about a half million dollars and her husband blew it all in no time ! Give an inch and a mile will be taken !
I think the OP should really take a second look at this guy ,this sound like a huge power trip to which could only get worse . The guy has jealousy issues and that is a RED flag!
I am befuddled here – what/who/where is this “s” of which you speak?
I had a friend who took her husband’s name. She had always thought she wouldn’t, but the truth was, she never really got along with her father, and she said, when it came down to it, she just had some man’s name-- it could be some man she didn’t like, and was connected to by the accident of birth, or it could be the man she loved whose name she chose freely.
I’d never thought about it before.
Also, I know another woman who couldn’t wait to ditch her name. It was Heine, Pronounced “heiney,” like “buttocks,” and she taught high school. She married a man named Spencer. Couldn’t wait to take his name.
I loved my father, and I liked my maiden name, but when I married a man named Maccaby, that was too good to pass up. We talked about changing the spelling to Maccabee when we married, but ultimately decided not to.
I know a “Brunvald” and “Goldman” who took the name Sienna, because brown and gold mixed make Sienna. It good they weren’t Wasserman and Erdman. They would have been the Muds.
That’s why my mother changed. She traded a long, difficult to spell, difficult to pronounce, difficult to remember Slavic name, for the slightly clunky, but very easy “Goldhammer.”
She thought no one would ever ask her to spell her name again, but when she checked into the hotel on her honeymoon, and gave the new name as hers for the first time, the clerk asked her how to spell it. She said she almost climbed over the counter and throttled him.
When a woman is referred to Mrs. HisFirstName HisLastName then the only thing distinguishing her from Mr. HisFirstName HisLastName is the “s” on the end of “Mrs.” Thus, her identity is reduced to an “s”.
Hahaha what a nub.
My wife took my last name legally in the US. Legally in China, which is her sole citizenship country, she kept her name. In China, I took her last name, and it’s on some legal documents. When I still resided and worked in China, both my English name and my Chinese name was on my work permit, so it was kinda “legally” my name in China.
Our marriage certificate, OTOH, is in Japanese. With characters for her name, and katakana for mine. There is an English translation of the marriage certificate certified by the US embassy (but all it certifies is that it is a translation). God knows how we sort that one out if it ever becomes a real legal issue.
Kids all have my wife’s name on their birth certificates, and my English last name on the Certification of Birth Abroad. Also, the Chinette’s all have English first name, full Chinese name in pinyin as their middle name, and English last name. The full Chinese middle name has come in handy, especially with airlines, to show that they are in fact the same person. Clear as mud, I know
Ok. First husband freaked out that I wanted to take his name. Freaked out. Ok d of forbade me. We moved provinces a year into the marriage and I changed my name to a hyphenated one.
When our son was born he freaked out agaon. Didn’t want me to register our son’s birth. We finally did…a week before we split up. I went back to my own name bit my son kept his father’s last name.
I live common law with my partner. We aren’t married, I won’t ever get married again. Weirdly, recently he said that he would want his wife to take his name. I told him that was the least sexy proposal of all time, and on that grounds I would refuse. We laughed but I’m not super happy about it.
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My elderly in-laws have different names. In Malaysia, you get an identity card when you are born, and changing that is a lot more difficult than changing your birth certificate would be in parts of the USA.
I guess if it’s the kind of women who takes it as a power issue, it /is/ a power issue.
For my 80 year old mother, who used my fathers name socially, not so much.
60 years ago women had a lot less freedom to say “no” to changing their names.
Back then women couldn’t buy real estate or a car without a male co-signer, and could legally be paid less for the exact same work as a man, and a lot of other bullshit, too.
To me, your story reads like “How DARE she let racism interfere with sexism!”
I took my husband’s name without feeling any major loss of power or identity. But only because he never made me feel obligated to change it. If I’d been insistent on keeping my name, he would have accepted that without complaint. And if he’d pressured me to take his, I probably would have pushed back. The decision felt entirely in my hands. Ultimately, I decided to take his name so that our family was united in last name, resulting in efficiencies in the long run. Although this choice meant my current name differs from that listed on my publications, at this point in my career, this doesn’t concern me.
What I think bothers people is the expectation that because you’re a wife, you are duty-bound to a custom that takes a woman’s autonomy and identity completely for granted. A name is a very personal thing, so I don’t judge any woman who doesn’t want to give up this part of herself just to be married. It’s also isn’t always logistically easy to get the name change you want. I opted to replace my middle name with my maiden one at the same time I took my husband’s last name, and this came with a fair amount of paperwork and expense.
I wonder if men who attach signficance to this are mainly worried about the opinion of outsiders. Do they worry that people will assume he isn’t the real head of the household, because his wife hasn’t outwardly subordinated herself to him? It sounds pretty bad when put this way, but it kind of mirrors the insecurity that some women have about engagement rings. If it’s not clearly expensive, then people might think he doesn’t really value you enough. Or he’s too broke to be a good provider. Or he lacks the manliness to be deserving of a wife. Etc. All of these beliefs come from centuries worth of patriarchal conditioning.
My wife took my last name, and I was a little dismayed about that, but figured it was her choice, not mine. We considered two other options:
- Combining our last names into “Bagrow,” which sounds either wonderfully Hobbity, or like where homeless bag ladies sleep. I was more into this idea than she was.
- Taking my mother’s maiden name, which I’m sure as hell not gonna share in case all y’all are identity thieves, but which is a common and whimsical English word. My wife was more into this idea than I was; although I love the name, I figured it could lead to hurt feelings from my dad, and didn’t want to go there.
Hyphenated last names are a pain, and she wanted our whole family to share a surname, so she took mine.
I mean, there’s all sorts of reasons to distrust the OP here, but it’s not like the situation in the OP is particularly unique. I don’t see how that advice column relates to the OP other than being about the same subject (unless I’m missing some key words that they both share.)
I’ve never understood the argument that women with long, complicated names would of course want to change to their husband’s shorter, more easily spelled or pronounced name. What about all the men with long, complicated names? And why would a woman need to get married in order to change her name if she wanted to simplify things? What would be stopping her from just choosing a new name and legally changing to that?
And some of us like our unusual names. There are literally five people in the world with my last name and I am related to all of them. It isn’t difficult to pronounce but people tend to panic when faced with it in writing, because of the unexpected distribution of many vowels. I always have to spell it, usually at least twice since the first time the person probably got stuck after the first syllable. But I still never considered changing my name to my husband’s more easily spelled and pronounced name.
I chose to change my name to my first husband’s because I preferred his shorter, more easily spelled and pronounced name. It wasn’t worth going to a lot of effort, but it’s really easy in the US for a woman to change her name with marriage.
To compare, I’ve long considered changing my first name to a variation on it that I’ve always gone by. Why don’t I do that? Because it’s harder than changing my last name with marriage was.