My ex’s former surname is fairly common and benign. Mine is very uncommon and I am regularly told how cool it is even by hotel clerks who have seen thousands of them. Still, I assumed that she’d keep her name. We literally never discussed the issue. I didn’t know that she was changing it until we were filling out the marriage license a couple of days before the ceremony.
It can be worse, the Spanish custom we inherited was to take the husband’s surname and to be called by the woman’s surname, the possessive preposition “de” and then the husband’s surname.
So my mom, Prímula Brandigamo, was (in the 80’s before the custom changed) called Prímula Bolsón for short, but also Prímula Brandigamo de Bolsón what in English would’ve been “Primula Brandybuck of Baggins” or “Baggin’s Primula Brandybuck”.
Fuck no. I married her not him. I asked her permission.
We hit 25 years this past summer - it still bugs him to this day, and I feel glad about that every time I’m reminded of it. Guy’s an asshole.
It was in 1964, but I did ask my wife’s step-father after she asked me to. I was a bit put-out, but he was going to pay for the wedding. Honestly, I have the impression that the only thing he cared about was that I was Jewish. He had broken all contact with a natural daughter who had married a non-Jew and welcomed her back with open arms when she got divorced.
I never asked my wife’s natural father who was quite obviously pleased with me.
100% truth. I think they requested $8000, or something like that.
It may be due to culture. My wife grew up in Hong Kong.
Thanks, wasn’t aware of that. And it was so long ago that I don’t remember if they referred to it as a “dowry” or not, so perhaps my terminology is incorrect. But they did request money.
ASIDE: I do love how the people behind the Spanish translation of the LotR films rendered names that don’t have a close equivalent in Spanish. Like Rosie Cotton would be Rosita Algodon easy peasy. But Samwise Gamgee doesn’t really translate, since it doesn’t really mean anything in English either. So the Spanish translators went with something equally nonsensical but equally cute. Samsagsz Gamyii.
Yup, apparently the “bride price” (pin jin) practice is still a thing in Hong Kong and other Chinese cultures.
Didn’t ask, she didn’t ask me to ask, and he had made it fairly clear before that he was OK with me (we dated almost four years).
However, I was very amused to watch this a few years later:
My wife’s dad was a bigamist. No - I didn’t ask his permission.
And to think that he was clown-shoes Jesus!
You write a hit song!
When I got married in 1989, the spouse wanted to have the wedding in a church. I wasn’t religious but didn’t particularly care, but I insisted if I agreed there would be no patriarchal traditions. No giving away the bride, no “love, honor, and obey,” we would both have wedding rings, no “you may kiss the bride” (we had “you may kiss”). And the spouse absolutely wasn’t going to ask my dad for permission for anything (he never brought it up, my relationship with my dad was great, but I was the only one who got to give permission for me to get married).
Everything went fine, nobody objected to anything, and we’re still married, so I guess my stubbornness didn’t hurt anything.
Two big noes from me.
On my first date with my first wife, her father met me at the door with a gun, so we weren’t exactly close (we got along better later.) With my second wife, I hadn’t even met her parents when we got engaged.
I was pleased to discover that reform Jewish weddings are surprisingly egalitarian. Each of the participants is escorted down the aisle by both their parents. The patriarchal stuff is all hidden in the Hebrew, which says something about “according to the laws and traditions of the Jewish people”, or some such. (Which are patriarchal.) But the words each person says are the same. The chuppah is held up by whoever you want, but we had two groom’s attendants and two bride’s attendants, and that’s typical. The only really gendered thing is that the man breaks the glass. (I’ve seen a couple do it together, but that’s a recipe for stepping on each other’s feet.) The traditional Jewish wedding has the man giving the woman a ring (technically, he is buying her from herself, and she accepts the ring as payment) but the modern reform wedding has the couple exchange rings.
Your story is pretty much mine. Except it sounds like you were the woman of that couple, whereas I was the guy. Same ideas though. And no, I don’t see any of that as stubbornness. Unless you had to overcome objections from soon-to-be spouse.
If she was still alive our 37th anniversary would be coming up soon. Yes, it worked as well as can be expected.
Heck no. My at the time my ‘girlfriend’ and I where sitting on the couch. We already owned property together. We knew we where going to get married at some point. Just hadn’t gotten around to it.
My then girlfriend just said “We should probably get married” I said “OK” It was all very romantic /s
That was 26 years ago. We are still going strong.
Are you kidding? I barely asked her. We’d known each other six weeks, were having a conversation about a piece of jewelry I said I wanted to buy her, and all of a sudden she said, “Was that a marriage proposal?” and I had to think “Wait, what did I just say? Oh, right, ‘…and I want to spend the rest of my life with you’.” My uber-articulate response was something like “Um, I guess so?”
We’re 38.5 years in, so we’re thinking it might work out.
We did call her parents afterward, woke her mother up, gave her the news; her bleary response is a family legend: “Well, that’s nice, dear. You kids have fun and we’ll see you in a couple of weeks.” Then after she hung up she realized what we and she had said. No cellphones yet and we weren’t home, so she couldn’t call back; she wound up calling my wife’s sister and saying “I think I did a bad thing”. Of course it was so obvious to us that she wasn’t awake that we were just laughing, not upset.
FLDS?
No objections whatsoever. He thought the whole patriarchal thing was stupid too, and I’ve always been a major tomboy. He’d just grown up in the Lutheran church, so he wanted a church wedding. At the time I hadn’t completely given up on religion yet, so I figured what the heck. Both our sets of parents had been married in Vegas (at the same place, coincidentally - the Little White Chapel) and I would have been fine with that. I was never about the ceremony. I just wanted to get married so we could get on with our lives.
I’m not sentimental about wedding stuff and never have been. My parents gave me $2500 to spend on the wedding. We had money left over. Our reception was at a local pizza restaurant where we hung out a lot, and people still remember it fondly. Surprisingly, nobody from either set of parents (and both my mom and his dad were… shall we say… opinionated normally) had a thing to say about any of our choices.
It wasn’t always just surnames; back in the '80s my mother would still get letters addressed to ‘Mrs [Dad’s first name] [Dad’s surname]’, like a wife was just some kind of appendage. It used to annoy her somewhat.