And my stepmother who insists on addressing everything to my 6mo. old son ‘Master K- P-’ She is one seriosly snooty bi…, sorry, lady.
I prefer Mrs. S- P-, and used to prefer Miss S- C-. Ms is not pleasing to my ear, but if i have no problem with other people using it. I took my dh’s name because I wanted to have the same name as my kids & my maiden name was awful. I want to know what happen to people with hyphenated names who marry each other. What do their kids get saddled with? Suzy Doe-Roe-Public-Shumblic?
At the hospital I work at we have the problem of people calling (or sending mail) for Mrs. John Smith.
We ask them for the patient’s first name and 90% of the time they can’t tell us. It sucks for the people calling but I can’t give out information on someone if you don’t even know their first name.
I mean, can you really expect me to believe that you are that concerned with a patient’s well-being that you have never even taken time to find out her first name? It may be the way you were brought up but I guess you’ll either change or you won’t get any info on your “friend.”
It is common in the United States for a married couple to want to have the same last name. Therefore upon marriage one spouse usually adopts the last name of the other spouse.
I know of a family of several brothers with the surname of Glaab (pronounced “Glob”). None of their wives took the name; they all kept their own names, except one Glaab brother who took his wife’s name.
It’s really not that big a deal. Your name is your name, no matter its origin. When I told people I would be keeping my surname after marriage, those who knew me well thought it odd, since “it’s your father’s name and you don’t like your father.” Wrong – it’s my name, all my own. It was given to me as a gift when I was born. It just happens to be the same as my father’s (and that of his family, my aunts and uncle, who are actually pretty cool – my dad’s the weird sheep).
He said it was important for a husband and wife to share a name because it showed that they were united before god and man. I said, i am glad to hear you are taking my name, because I am not changing mine. He said he would be propud to take my name if i would give it to him.
His last name when we met was Johnson. Mine is slightly less common.
For the life of me I do not understand why anyone would change their name upon getting married. Are you not still the same person? It would make more sense to me if you changed your name upon being admitted to the bar, or becoming an MD with a seven figure income.
For what it’s worth, folks with hyphenated names often drop one name or the other as they grow up, for simplicity’s sake, if nothing else. I suspect that if two hyphenated people married, they’d choose one name from each for the kids. Personally, though, I think that the whole hyphenation business is confusing; it makes things a lot simpler for all of the members of a family to have the same name. If my future wife would prefer to keep her own, then I’d have no problem doing like lee’s husband did, and changing mine. If it’s acceptable for a woman to change her name, then why not for a man?
I have encountered quite a few people who believe that it is a legal requirement that a woman take her husband’s name on marriage. It always surprises them to learn that it is not.
My wife kept her own name when we married, a decision that baffles many people.
My ex-wife took my name when we married and uses it still. I wish there were some way I could compell her to stop using it.
Regarding the “Mrs.” being an abbreviation. I went back to my source, The Dictionary of Misinformation, written by a guy named Tom Burnam. He actually acknowledged that it was originally an abbreviation for mistress. He merely felt that it was no longer so, as the word is no longer read mistress.
No shit. Usually the wife takes the husband’s name, though. I was just curious as to why lee’s hubby took her name, rather than the other way around. I know of 2 couples in which the man took the woman’s last name when they married because her name was easier to spell and pronounce.
I also know a couple who just combined their last names, not hyphenated, to make a whole new name. Basically, if she had been Mary Brown and he was John Smith, they are now the Smithbrowns.
lee, one more nosey question. When I married and took my husband’s name, I just had to mail a copy of the marriage license to various places (Social Sec., DMV, etc.) saying I was changing my name and that was that. One of the couples I know where the man took the wife’s name had to go to court and legally change his name…much more of a hassle than for me to change mine. Did that happen to your hubby?
Unfortunately, you’re allowing a minimum wage clerk decide your relationship to that company. Generally the persons who are actually handling the forms that are returned are simply data entry clerks who are being judged on the number of keystrokes that are being entered in an hour. (They are, in a remarkable number of businesses, women high school graduates or almost-graduates who are either bringing in a small supplemental income to the family or middle-aged divorced women trying to supplement their alimony.) They are unconcerned with the niceties of your instruction. The customer service manager four flights upstairs would really like to pay attention to your requests and would be distraught to know that your instructions are being ignored. However, the data entry manager who is concerned strictly with productivity and wishes that someone would fire the entire customer services staff so that her “girls could get some work done” is not going to put up with any nonsense about allowing mere customers to dictate the way that they are adressed on a stupid form letter.
Now, there is no reason why you should put up with a company ignoring your choices. However, do realize that it may have more to do with internal managers with personal agendas than it does with a genuine unconcern for detail on the part of management. (You can also point out that the CEO could direct the data entry manager to actually help the company for a change, but most CEO’s live in deathly fear of the women who actually run data entry (who are each far more fearsome than a combination of Nurse Ratched and Annie Wilkes).)
Your friend and her husband were had. A man has the right to change his name upon marriage in exactly the same manner as a woman would. The county clerk tried to feed me and my husband that line of hogwash so I called the ACLU to see if she were correct. They told me that this battle has been fought and won in all 50 states and if the county clerk tried to force us to do something more than any woman would normally need to do to change her name when she married then to tell her that the ACLU would challenge that in court. We informed the clerk that we were aware of our rights and she decided that it was unnecessary for him to go to court to change his name.
We went to the social security office, and they accepted the license as proof and then to the dmv which accepted the social security card. Some people have reported that the dmv accepts the license and the social security office will only accept the change once the driver’s license has been updated. That leads me to believe that the only reason either would not accept it is not legal but personal stubborness of the employees.