The SO’s Jewish. <blank>enstein has a nice ring to it.
Especially if your last name is Franks. I was hoping your boyfriend’s last name was Bickle.
If you want to be really hardcore, you could swap names completely (both first and last). It will also nicely confuse the hell out of everyone.
I only know a few married gay couples and none of them have changed their names (not even the ones with kids). But then again not many of my straight married friends have changed their names, either. Sure you might be able to sort things out on your driver’s license and work documents, but think of all the email accounts with your name on them!
Shrug, do what people have traditionally done in Hispanic and Portuguese cultures: each keeps his own name.
Mind you, my own lastname is a three-word pain in the butt, so I often joke I should’a gotten married in the US and taken his lastname.
At the risk of derailing the thread, is hyphenating surnames a common practice in the US? I only ask because, in the UK, it’s seen as rather pretentious, because it’s common practice amongst the aristocracy (who view their family names as historically significant and hence worth keeping). This ‘may’ be changing slightly with the advent of same-sex civil partnerships, but I don’t have any figures…
Just one anecdata from a foreigner, but I did notice a large amount of hyphenation among my female American colleagues. Never met a Brit with a dash, but Americans yeah, by the dozen.
It’s very unusual in Spain, which is why I noticed. I only know two Spanish families with dashes and both cases are XIXth-century noveaux riches where it was the maternal side that made money, so they went Dadname-Momname in order to somewhat preserve the connection between the names of the business and the family (and in both cases, the business isn’t even owned by the descendants any more).
I’d say it’s changed a lot, not due to same-sex couples; it’s partly due to married women (and a few men) double-barrelling their names, and mostly due to kids being given both parents’ surnames.
It’s still more common for kids to have just one parent’s surname, often the Dad’s even if the parents aren’t married and the Dad isn’t the main carer, but the average under 20 year old wouldn’t notice a double-barrelled name as having anything to do with class at all.
My partner and I both have names we don’t like. If SS marriage is ever legal here, we’ve decided to ditch our last names and pick a new one.
It’s up to you. Not even heterosexual couples are bound to traditional protocols if they don’t want to be. I know a het couple who got married last summer, and they both took each others’ last names: he is HisFirstName HisLastName HerLastName, and she is HerFirstName HerLastName HisLastName.
Hyphenation isn’t strictly necessary if you decide you want to use both names. You can use one last name as a “middle name” as above. If you do that it has been traditional to add your spouse’s name after your own, but there’s no rule dictating that, either.
Your names don’t have to match, unless that’s important to you.
I have a hyphenated name and it’s uncommon enough that people often don’t know what I’m talking about when I spell my name and get to the hyphen. I have had to describe what a hyphen is to clueless people a number of occasions.
Thanks, mom and dad. :dubious: (And no, I couldn’t drop either name without seriously upsetting one of them.)