My wife retains her original name. I always thought that the idea that marriage changes ones identity so completely that one needs a new name to be kind of creepy.
I voted on my wife’s behalf. She took my last name when we got married nine years ago.
Like a couple of other posters, I happily traded in my very difficult birth name when I married my first husband with his great, easy to spell last name. I told him at the time that I was marrying him for his name and would never give it up. I was right! When I got remarried, I kept my first husband’s last name. I considered hyphenating because the names sound really good together.
Mine did the same. I think she made it sound as though this is common in Latin American countries (she’s Peruvian) but I couldn’t say for certain. At any rate, her old middle name got bumped and she’s [First Name] [Maiden] [My Last Name] now.
My daughter took her husband’s name. It is earlier in the alphabet and easier to spell.
I answered for my wife, OK? She has never used my name.
In one town we lived in, she got a library card and I didn’t , and the librarians called me “Mr. Hername”. So I’ve actually been known by her name, more often then she has been known by mine.
For women who opted to keep their names, what was the decision for any children? Husband’s surname? Yours? Hyphenated?
My wife kept her name. The only people that seem to have an issue with using her original name are her family. My mother and father in law both give her my last name when they use her last name in letters or conversation. I think it’s disrespectful to not use whichever name a person has chosen to use. (There may be exceptions in strange cases, but taking or not taking a spouse’s name is not one of those.) My father uses her correct last name even though it’s (transitively) his name he declined to take. Then again, my mother retained her maiden name when she married him in the 70s and it was less common than it is now. My sister also kept her maiden name when she married.
ETA: Answered for my wife.
I changed my name twice. When I married in my early 20s, and again in my 30s. Second time I was married for 17 years. If and when I get married again, I will be keeping my last name. Both kids are from my second marriage. My grown son goes by his dad’s last name, and my almost 16 year old daughter chooses to have both her dad’s and mine.
Friends of mine are married, and are both veterinarians. They each kept their own names, professionally, for reasons. The funny part is when Dr Smith sees a patient and the owners complain about what lousy care they recieved from Dr Jones, and vice-versa.
MilliCal uses my last name, but my wife’s maiden name is one of her middle names.
She’s got enough of a name to qualify as royalty. If we ever got really mad at her we could let het know by using her full name, slowly.
I don’t hyphenate my name.
My husband was a foundling - quite literally found as an infant in a basket on the steps of a church. He was assigned a last name as his wasn’t known. When he proposed, he asked me if I’d let him change his last name to my last name when we got married. I’d never heard of such a thing, but we checked it out and it was legal to do so, so that’s what we did. He had always wanted a ‘real’ last name, and now he had one.
It certainly caused a LOT of explaining and proving of names over the years, which was inconvenient, but now all these years later I hear of other people doing this also, so now I feel like a groundbreaker rather than just weird.
I’ve never been married but if I were to be I’d use whichever name sounded better. My last name is okay but if my husband had a better one I’d take his. I wouldn’t *expect *him to take mine if he didn’t want to but the option is there (I’m looking at you Mr.s Hamm, Depp and Pitt).
I kept my last name because I felt that changing it would be like changing who I was to the world. It’s hard to explain but like…having everything labeled Angel Soft my entire life and suddenly changing it to Angel Hard seemed like…I dunno. I didn’t want to become part of a whole. I wanted to remain myself and independent. Marriage didn’t last long so in the end it worked out but it really was a point of argument between us.
In this culture women don’t have last names.
It is your father’s name or your husband’s. We don’t pass down last names of women as some cultures might. The last name is to show which man you belong to. So there are no women who keep their last names as there are none. You can keep the name from your father or change to the name of your husband.
This stinks!
Nah.
I may have gotten my last name from my father, but I’ve lived with it for 45 years now and it’s mine now.
This, except I am the wife. It’s traditional in my family, I was surprised to learn later that it is not that common.
Which culture is this? And do boys get a different name from that given to their sisters?
Oh, yeah. Major oversight in the poll.
My husband and I discussed it briefly when we got engaged - as it turns out, he had a mild preference for me taking his last name (although he maintained it was of course my decision and he’d be fine with whatever I picked). Since I had basically no real preference (my identity and sense of self being much, much more firmly attached to my first name than my last), I shrugged and changed my last name. I will confess that my decision was fairly heavily influenced by the fact that I was going to have to replace my driver’s license anyway. I’d moved to New York about a year and a half earlier and hadn’t bothered to replace my Alaska license since I wasn’t driving because I lived near a subway line, and when I got engaged, I moved in with my husband - who did not live near a subway line. Living with him basically meant I’d be driving a car occasionally again, so I had to replace my freaking driver’s license anyway.*
This was also was easier for the older members of my family - none of them would have said anything, but they’re all fairly traditional.
It helps a lot that I traded one incredibly common and easily spelled last name for another incredibly common and easily spelled last name. Not quite “Smith” to “Jones” but not far off it either.
*This turned out to be the single most annoying part of getting married. You would think swapping one valid driver’s license for another would not be a big effing deal. You would be wrong. So very wrong.