My cousin’s daughter and her wife took my cousin’s father’s name (her maiden name, which she hasn’t used in decades.) Both the last names of the couple were hard to spell, and my uncle was a very admirable man, whose name they were proud to carry.
I am one of 12 cousins in my generation, on my mom’s side. We are divided equally M and F.
Eleven of us married. All heterosexual marriages.
My sister and my female cousins all kept their name. The women marrying me and my male cousins all changed theirs.
No, I don’t know what it “means,” but it’s interesting.
Well, like I said, a lot of mothers find it important (and much less hassle) to have the same surname as their children. Would your ex-wife be more amenable if you proposed changing the children’s surname to her maiden name?
From what you say, it sounds like she has some willingness to use her maiden name professionally and perhaps socially, and perhaps if her kids had the same name she’d be more willing to take the leap to re-adopting it legally as well.
(I don’t know how the use of a marriage-specific honorific like “Mrs.” would play out in that decision, in your culture and in your situation. Some divorced women consider it inappropriate or nonsensical to style themselves “Mrs. Maidenname”, but at the same time (as @Voyager observed), as divorced mothers they want the nomenclature to make it clear that their kids were born in wedlock. So they continue to use “Mrs. Marriedname”.)
“Ms” is perfect for situations like, “I’m not married, but i have these kids who were born in wedlock”. So much so that there was a time when people assumed that a woman who went by “Ms” must be divorced.
My MIL went by Dr. HisLastName. She dated other guys. She wasn’t trying to pass as still married.
There are things you give away when you marry that you can’t take back. The children are still there, for instance. Time, memories, stuff that can’t be undone. Yes, in theory, the name could be undone. But i don’t think that’s a reasonable ask.
It’s now her name. She can use whatever name she wants. (In the US you can legally use most any name you want, so long as you aren’t using it to defraud people. You fine have to marry a guy to take his name, you can just use it if you want to.)
If @scudsucker really doesn’t want to share a name with his ex, he can change his name. But I can’t imagine it’s worth it to do so.
Using Dr. avoids the issue, but I never use Doctor socially. And I wasn’t implying that the woman using Mrs. was trying to pass as married. Back then it might have shown a level of maturity that could be missing from a 40-year-old Miss. Plus I’ve always sensed - in books and movies from back then - it showed a level of sexual maturity also.
We have a much better system today, I agree. I was speaking historically.
Example: Thelma Todd in “Horsefeathers” was the college widow. Definitely not virgin, and therefore hot stuff.
Why would I change MY name? That name is my family name, it goes back many generations to my British heritage. There is even a wooden structure similar to Stonehenge (but made of wood) in Hampshire named with my family name.
I mean, it would cost me R250 ( USD$67 ) to change mine, but what would I change it to?
It occurs to me I could be petty to make a point and change my own to her maiden name, but although I can be petty, I am not sure I am that petty.
Do you think she’d give a shit? You probably think about this infinitely more than she does.
That is precisely correct.
It is a big deal to me, she considers it a trivial matter.
That is what irritates me.
I have offered to pay the appropriate Government (Department of Home Affairs) fee on her behalf.
That’s such an incredibly small fraction of the cost of changing your name. It’s mostly about having to notify everyone. And then needing to keep Tracy of the paperwork for the rest of your life. I will never do it again.
(Honestly, treating that cost as if it’s the issue verges on insulting. I like you. I know nothing about your ex. Maybe she’s absolutely horrible. But i am totally on her side in this one.)
Could be worse.
I know a couple my age who got married way back when and she took his surname. They had kids who also got their father’s surname. They divorced when the kids were little and a few years later after the kids were nearly grown & gone the ex-wife changed back to her birth surname. So far so ordinary.
Then a few years later their adult daughter changed her surname from her birth surname (that of her father) to the birth surname of her mother. Which caused great angst w Dad and some angst with her siblings who were in effect forced to choose sides in the name wars.
Are you willing to do all of the work to notify all of the places where the names needs to be changed and all of the involved paperwork and fix all of the fuckups for the next few decades?
According to a Pew research study in 2023, 79% of women in opposite gender marriages take their spouse’s name. This isn’t going away anytime soon.
Great cite. thank you. But this
is not quite true. What they really said was
- According to the Pew study, 79% of women surveyed who ever married, even 50 years ago, took their husband’s surname when they married.
The difference is significant. It was 85% in the age 50+ women, but 73% in the 49yo & younger crowd. I’d bet that if they’d further segregated on age and duration of marriage we’d find that among young newlyweds, even the 73% number would be a major exaggeration.
Given that marriages usually last a long time, what matters to predict the future of marital surname changes in e.g. 2027, is to know about marriages formed in e.g. 2025. Not all marriages in existence in 2025.
Patriarchal society inadvertently showing its ass there, ISTM. (Not intending any reflections on any individuals in this family of your acquaintance, just noticing some of the societal assumptions that get baked into all of us.)
Second-wave feminists complained that traditional patriarchal patronymic surname conventions, where wife and children are expected to take the husband/father’s surname, are sexist and oppressive.
Counter-arguments maintained that nowadays this is just an arbitrary convention for purposes of convenience, not any intended disparagement or deprecation of the wife/mother’s surname or the family that bears it. Spouses/parents who follow these traditional naming conventions are freely choosing to do so, and are at liberty to make other choices if they prefer.
And when some people do consciously make other choices about surname use, a whole lot of people who no longer have veto power over such choices lose their absolute shit about it.
Hmmm, but I thought it’s just an arbitrary convention not signifying any disparagement of the surname that isn’t chosen or the family that bears it, right?
I say this with sympathy and love, Doper to Doper, but: are you hearing yourself here? Are you noticing that you’re blithely taking for granted the importance of traditional naming practices when it suits you, but dismissing them as minor issues when it doesn’t?
The conventional double standard plays out like this:
- A man’s surname is an important part of his history and family heritage, and his legal and moral right to it is inviolable. A woman’s surname is far more subject to societal and personal pressures: she may be strongly expected to change her surname on marriage, but her moral “right” to her changed surname may be considered dependent on her marital status.
- A father passes his family surname to his children, and their identity is strongly bound to his identity and ancestry by their shared name. A mother who keeps or resumes her birth surname should not expect to have the same surname as her children, and if she desires the stronger identity bond with them that a shared surname gives, tough luck.
- Modern practices about surname use are just arbitrary conventions arising from historical traditions but no longer enforcing sexist expectations: in practice, a woman is just as free as a man to make whatever choices she wants about her surname. But if a man feels that their children should have his surname instead of hers, or that after divorce she’s no longer ethically “entitled” to go on using “his” surname, his objections should take precedence over her preferences.
None of this double standard is intrinsically @scudsucker’s fault, of course, or the fault of any other individual, but its influence is (as usual) making the situation worse. If you really believed that your ex-wife has just as much intrinsic right as you do to continue identifying herself by the same surname that her own children bear, I don’t think this issue would be bugging you so much.
Until the Smith-Jones boy marries the Miller-Johnson girl; Smith-Jones-Miller-Johnson is not only a mouthful but will get truncated in many databases.
Yup, none of these possible nomenclature conventions, including the currently standard one of patronymic surname, really does an adequate and balanced job of representing the merging of two separately-surnamed individuals into a new family unit.
IIRC the Icelandic system is decent and gender neutral. Simplifying / Caricaturing a bit …
There is no “family name” to pass down. The surname of the next generation is taken from the given name of the same sex parent plus a gender suffix. When Alice marries Bob and they pump out Carl & Eve, Carl’s full name is Carl Bobson and Eve’s is Eve Alicedottir.
If nobody adopts another’s surname at marriage, then this system also works fine if Alice & Bob get divorced or widowed and marry others and have yet more kids. All of Alice’s female offspring by any man share the Alicedottir surname. All of Bob’s male offspring by any woman are Bobson. The second spouses of both Alice & Bob also get the same first class treatment of their same-sex bio-kids.
This whole system works great until Carl or Eve decide to come out as trans.