Taking Your Husband's Last Name, or, The Name Game: Paging Married Dopers.

In My Humble Opinion
41

I didn’t take it. No big feminist/identity reason, it was partly loving my own name and partly being unwilling to go to the trouble of changing it. Kiminy and I should go have a beer sometime because I had the same issues–I was a PhD student and felt like I should still be my maiden name when I got the diploma. My son has my husband name and our phone is in his name. My son’s school regularly calls me by my husband’s last name, which I’m fine with this and don’t discourage or correct.

My in-laws introduce me as having their last name and that’s fine too. It’s not a big statement, for me; I sort of think of myself as both Cranky Maiden and Cranky Married. Best of both worlds, until the confusion starts.

42

It’s often used as shorthand for Dear Husband, so that’s how I read it.

Aspidistra: Icelandic women traditionally keep their last names, which makes sense when you realize that the convention is that Erik’s male child could be Hjalmar Eriksson, while the female would be Inga Eriksdottir. Barring a sex change, she’ll always be Erik’s daughter, so her name will always reflect that fact! Hjalmar’s kids could be Leif Hjalmarsson and Kristina Hjalmarsdottir, and so on.

43

Thanks Stern that’s interesting to know

I just did some googling for other countries where women don’t change their names on marriage. They’re a pretty eclectic bunch, feminism-wise. Some which I have seen mentioned:

Spain
Korea
Somalia
Iran
Yemen
Jordan
Syria
China (but I’ve seen sites that contradict this, so I don’t know what to think…)
Malaysia…

…and that great bastion of women’s rights… Saudi Arabia

:eek:

44

Dear Husband ??

45

That fact is largely due to the naming conventions in ancient Rome, I think, which have a certain similarity to Icelandic ones. (The name bit, not the killing bit.)

I am not married, but I will take my spouse’s name unless I really can’t stand it. I don’t like my last name. It’s also too long to hyphenate, IMO. The one time I considered hyphenating it, it would have been decent–Carpenter-Lake. That would have done. Pity I’m not still with him.
:stuck_out_tongue:

46

I took my husband’s name and dropped my middle name and so I am now:

Firstname Maidenname Marriedname

I never really considered doing it differently. Not because I think this is the best/only option but becasue it was so very long ago and that is just what you did. :slight_smile: Plus now I am glad our whole family has the same last name, although I do not think that is a necessity.

I have an acquaintance who kept her maiden name. She and her husband have 2 daughters and one has her last name and one has his last name. Somewhat confusing, that.

47

I insisted on keeping my name, but it was fine with me if my wife wanted to keep hers. As it turned out, she wanted to take mine. She still uses her original name at work, though, since she says that she’s worried that if she uses a non-Japanese name with clients, they’ll assume that she’s fluent in English and start sticking her with all the interpreting/translating work.

48

It’s interesting that Korea is on the list, since Japan is completely the opposite: couples can take either the husband’s name or the wife’s name, but they’re required to both have the same name on their official documents. Allowing separate names comes up before the parliament every other year or so, but keeps getting shouted down by the old farts who claim it will destroy Japanese society. Maybe not surprisingly, one of the most vocal opponents to separate names didn’t see anything wrong with using her maiden name when she ran for re-election earlier this year. :rolleyes:

Anyway, the only exception to this rule is when a Japanese citizen marries a foreigner. In these cases, separate names are allowed, as they apparently don’t result in the collapse of society and breakdown of public morals.

49

I’m another hyphenate, just because I found it easier to not completely give up my identity. It helped that our names work together well, five letters and four, short, simple, easy to understand, spell and say.

A friend of mine got married yesterday and reports that her husband took her name. Hers is long and ethnic and easy to mangle. His was short, four letters and simple as pie. I love that he took her name. It cracks me up.

50

If I had taken my wife’s last name, then we would currently be Paul & Linda McCarthy.

We get enough Beatle jokes as it is. Damn if I was gonna make it worse. :dubious:

51

Kept my maiden name. Hubby didn’t care, neither did any of his family. Though every so often I get an old friend or member of my family ask me sotto voice “What’s your last name now?” (We’ve been married six years, for the record.)

As for why I did it, well, when I was a child, my mother remarried twice. Both times she changed her name, both times the marriage ended abruptly. Neither lasted long. So my mother would enter the long process of not only getting divorced, but changing her name over. Changing it back seemed to be more difficult than getting the divorce. (Go figure.) So I vowed that if I ever tied the knot I was keeping my name. As I said, the hub didn’t care, so there you have it. And neither of us cares if one of us gets called by the other’s last name.

52

I never had any great love for my last name and don’t have a relationship to speak of with my father, so even I found it kind of surprising when I kept my name upon marrying.

My logic…both our names are frequently mispronunced (which made hyphenating an even worse option), my husband didn’t want to give up his name, and I realized how much of my identity was wrapped up in my complete name, just as is.

53

I was planning to take my husband’s surname for the first year of our engagement. Then one person too many said, “You’re going to be a completely different person after the wedding,” and I snapped, just in time. Why am I supposed to be transformed by a wedding, but the groom gets to stay the same? Nope, I didn’t want to change, I like myself as I am. My name might be “only my father’s last name”, but my fiance’s name is also only his father’s last name, why should he be more attached to his than I am to mine? I suggested that he take my much easier to spell last name, and he suggested that we both hyphenate, which we did.

Also, I didn’t want to end up like my aunt, who’s stuck keeping her awful ex-husband’s surname so that she can have the same name as the children she’s raising all by herself now that he’s run off. How many other women, even those who aren’t divorced, are in that position, doing most of the work to raise kids who will carry someone else’s surname? Yeah, maybe the kids themselves know who did most of the work, but future generations will trace themselves back by the father’s surname and will consider themselves “Smiths” or “Jones” because that’s what endured, and it was from him.

My husband was amazed by all the small steps it takes to change a surname after marriage. I was amazed that we got our Social Security cards, driver’s licenses (NJ and Massachusetts), and bank accounts (NJ and Massachusetts) changed without anyone asking to see the copy of the NJ and Massachusetts state laws which said he could change his name with just a marriage license, even though we dutifully brought it along everywhere.

Our daughters will have his birth surname, our sons will have my birth surname. If the first two kids are the same sex, the second will have the opposite name of the first. We think this might break the hex that seems to be on middle children, where all the teachers judge them against the eldest child. So, for example, if we were Jane and John Smith-Jones, the kids would be Mary Anne Jones and Robert Jacob Smith. We could have decided to give the kids our hyphenated surname, but they probably would have dropped one half or the other when they got married, so as to hyphenate with their spouses. This way we spare them to problem of making a decision on which half.

My in-laws haven’t said much about it. A few months ago, my brother-in-law said, “I’ll have to find an old-fashioned girl to marry, I’m the only who can pass on the “Jones” name now.” I quickly responded, “What about your sister?” He was pretty quiet after that :smiley:

54

It’s the “whole family came out to watch” part that got me. Even if you were happy as a stripper, would you really want your Dad coming out to watch you??

To the OP - I’m not married, but in a relationship, and I don’t intend to take his name if we do get married, but that’s only because it’s a foreign name that nobody here would be able to spell. It’s quite common in Ireland for wives not to take the husband’s name, so I don’t anticipate any problems.

55

Chinese women have a fair bit of room for flexibility when they marry. If they decide to take their husband’s name, they just place it in front of their own, thus Chan Mei Ling marries Mr Fong and becomes Fong Chan Mei Ling. She can then decide whether to call herself Mrs Fong or Miss/Ms Chan. Many married Chinese women in Hong Kong will be Miss (generally preferred to Ms) xxx at work (where she’s an individual) and Mrs yyy to, say, their property management company (where she is part of a couple). Sociolinguists refer to this kind of thing as acts of identity.

As for my own wife, she had no desire to take my name (which is double-barrelled, although she wouldn’t have been any keener had it been simple!). So she is simply Ms Pang.

When we had a daughter, we thought it would be nice if she had an English name and a Chinese name. Her English name follows mine as per the custom, while her Chinese name follows her mother’s family name.

56

Brynda Kem-pa? Brenn-ek-a?

CalmKiwi I would Love being a Smith, rock band included, as when asked to spell it, I would say, " L-u-x-u-r-y- Y-a-c-h-t"

Heeee!

Just think if I, as a Smith, married a Smith. Then I could be Shirley Smith-Smith Luxury Yacht- Warbler and mess with everyone’s minds collectively.

57

Smith is hellish! Try booking a table at a resturant under Smith, I may be paranoid but I always feel like they think it is a wind up. Good name for dirty weekends though :smiley:

58

It is also common practise in Quebec, Canada. I have been told, but have not researched, that this is because the divorce rate is so astoundingly high there.

59

…dammit, submitted too soon…

I took my husband’s name. I had no professional ties in the US, and my name is always spelled incorrectly and often pronounced incorrectly. The fact that my son had a name different from my own compounded that. I didn’t want my son’s, my husband’s, and my names to be all different. It’s confusing enough with school, but with the immigration issues, it’s just worse.

Now I also have a German name which is always mispronounced. I don’t understand why, it’s very straightforward. People always say “Walker” or “Walter” or the like. People who flunked grade two, I’d think.

60

My wife was never given a middle name because her family intended her to take her future husband’s last name at a later date. Her grandmother has actually been using her husband’s name since she was 17, so it’s not that unusual.

But we’re from Quebec, which is rather unusual socially, and early in the 90s (or late in the 80s?) decided that all women had to use their maiden names throughout their entire lives on government documents in order to prevent fraud, so suddenly grandmothers were going back to names they hadn’t used in 50 years :wink:

Now, the missus didn’t take my last name when we were married (and I’d actually think it was strange if she had taken my name), even though some members of my clueless family refer to her as if she did (heck, we were even introduced at the wedding as Mr. Barbarian and Dr. her name-- not even a ‘Mrs.’ )

We’re planning to maintain this with the kid too. When it’s born, it’ll get my last name if it’s a boy, and her last name if it’s a girl.

Looking at other families, I really don’t think it matters if kids have the same last name or not. One family I know has 4 different last names-- with four members.
Mr. His last name, Mrs Her maiden name, daughter birthdad’s last name, and son hislastname-herlastname.