As most of you know, I am getting married in October. Amid all of the preparations, the thought suddenly occurred to me that I would no longer have the same identity as I have had for the last 24 years.
My fiancé doesn’t really understand this. To him it’s simple, you get married, and the wife takes the husband’s name. But to me it’s not so cut and dried (plus I have a pretty cool sounding Dutch name).
Did anyone else have issues with this? How did you handle it?
Perhaps the possibility of keeping your original name is there? Just a thought. My mother, when she was engaged to my father, did not want to be the fifth Mrs. X (father is youngest of 11) in the family, so they hyphenated.
And no, X is not my actual last name.
Well, there are a lot of ways around this that you might want to discuss with your husband to be.
One, you can always hyphenate. Deciding whose name goes first or last can be a little difficult for some people. But, this seems to be the common practice nowadays.
Two, you can combine your names. My friend Ru’s parents had the names, Greissman and Hollingsworth. They are now the Greissworths. Which sounds pretty cool to me.
Some more progressive, and I use that term loosely, couples are keeping both their names and not worrying about one taking the other. This gets a little confusing when the little ones come along. What name do they take?
And I know a few who actually take the wife’s name. Usually because the wife is the professional in the family and has built a name for herself in her career, and the stay-at-home husband/dad will just take her name. This is also a possibility.
In all honesty, I think no matter what you call yourself, you’re still you. You may not feel the same about this, but if you’ll permit me to be a little sappy, “What’s in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” And I think this holds true.
For me, it wasn’t an issue. When my wife and I married, her last name had remained unchanged from her first marriage where she took her husband’s last name. I was equally open to her taking that opportunity to change it back to her maiden last name, or to mine.
I just wasn’t willing to be married to her ex-husband’s wife.
She kept his name because it was easier for the rest of the world to deal with (her maiden name is a pretty simple three sylable polish name, but folks would always attemtp to fancy it up and thus get it wrong).
When my sister got married, her husband took her last name because she felt strongly about not giving up her last name, and he wanted them to be the same.
I am a little troubled by your fiance not understanding this. Perhaps it’s an issue the two of you need to explore a little more deeply?
-Doug
Many kids around here simply have two last names. Some are hyphenated, some are simply “Kevin Smith Jones” or whatever. I think that’s a little cumbersome, but to each his own.
Me, I got married last May. I was REALLY attached to my last name, its Irish heritage, etc. So I took my maiden name and now use it as my middle name. I changed it on my Soc.Sec. card and drivers license and that’s how I sign my signature. So I’m not a hyphenate, and our kids will have only Mr. Beef’s original last name, but I get to keep the maiden name close at hand. It’s comforting.
Mom did that too - but I think it’s very rare. People are usually confounded when I try to explain it to them.
Not that rare – that’s what both my wife and my mother did. It helped that my wife always disliked her “real” first name. Her parents wanted to give her a name that’s a common enough word, but rarely used as a name, but they decided to hedge and give her a conventional first name, using their first choice as a middle name. They’ve always used her middle name as her first name, and that’s how she’s always wanted to be known, but she frequently ran into problems with people who insisted on referring to her by her “real” first name. She didn’t want to lose her maiden name (same reasons as yours, except in this case it’s Jewish heritage), but while I’m not philosophically opposed to hyphenated names, I am opposed to certain combinations on aesthetic grounds, and ours would have been one of those: classic German-derived Jewish surname plus very common English/Scots-Irish surname = “what were they thinking?”. Combining the two into some hybrid would have been even worse. She decided, since she was going to be legally changing her name anyway, to lose the first name, promote her middle name to her first name, and use her maiden name as her middle name.
In my mom’s case, my grandparents for some reason neglected to give her a middle name at all at birth. When she married my father, she elected to use her maiden name as a middle name (there are lots of bureaucracies that don’t deal well with people who don’t have anything to put in every space on the forms).
That’s exactly what my ex-wife did, and it’s a good idea.
I’ve been worrying about this too 
I don’t have a problem with finace’s surname, and I’m quite happy to take his name… but I don’t know how I’m going to get used to having a new name. I’ve always been Cazzle T., and now I’m going to be Cazzle B., and it’s not a bad name, it’s just not the one I’m used to. I had already planned to adopt my maiden surname as a second middle name (so I’ll be Cazzle L. T. B.). I’ve always wondered how long it has taken other women to get used to their new name.
I’ve been saying my new name to myself a lot to try and get used to it, but I still think I’m going to have trouble adjusting to it for a while after the wedding.
Get a new job soon after you get married, it’ll take care of that awkward name-change period pronto! I kid, but seriously, I changed jobs (not for that purpose, of course) and now I barely recognize my maiden name as my own.
If you want to make the transition as smooth as possible, do all the paperwork (new driver license, soc.security card, checks, credit cards) ASAP. The more you see it in print, the cleaner the “break” will be.
I am so glad that I was wrong about the “maiden/middle” name thing being rare! I thought it was common, too, until I moved to Minnesota - and people started looking at me funny.
The problem with hyphenating or using it as a middle name is that my maiden name is quiet long. It is Dutch, and it two words. My SO’s name is long too, so together the names would be really long. It’s not that I dislike his last name, it’s fine. I just really like my own too.
Who ever thought this would require so much thought?
My husband doesn’t have a middle name, either. You’re right, places like the DMV want EVERY blank filled in. Sometimes he puts “N/A” or “None”, and yes, he’s gotten stuff addressed to him with ‘None’ as his middle name. Stupid people.
I also chose to drop my given middle name, and keep my maiden name as my middle name. Well, I didn’t really “drop” the given middle name, but it wouldn’t all fit on my license. My maiden name is 8 letters (and very Scottish) and my married name is 12 letters (and very Italian). I chose not to hypenate for the obvious reasons…well, to me it was obvious. Twenty letters, both names very ethnic, sorry, not for me. People have enough trouble pronouncing my last name; I’d rather not make it any harder than it has to be.
I never felt like I was losing my identity. I liked the idea of taking my husband’s name, I felt like it made us more of a family. Just my opinion, of course.
My daughter has a friend whose parents did this. They combined both names and both hubby and wife used it (like if his name was Black and her name was Stone, they were now the Blackstones {not the real name, BTW} ). It worked for them; of course it wouldn’t work for all names.
I took my hubby’s name, because it was an easier name and there were no strong ethnic identities to either name. However, I believe when I went through the whole wedding/name change thing that I was given the choice to use my maiden name as a middle name automatically. I didn’t take it, though, because my middle name is okay, and I got tired of spelling my maiden name for other people anyway. Now my maiden name looks funny to me when I go back after 7 years and see it written somewhere.
As far as getting used to it, do what every teenage girl does when she has a boyfriend. Practice writing it and saying it out loud! 
Also the suggestion about getting the paperwork all done up front is a really good one!
It’s perfectly acceptable in this day and age for the wife not to take on any part of the husband’s name. Not common perhaps, but acceptable. I also have friends who have taken their husband’s name in a casual setting, but keep their maiden name for professional purposes. That would have been fine by me.
The whole maiden name as middle name is fine by me too, that’s what my mom did.
I would have been ultimately ok with whatever choice my wife made, but I was happy that she just went with the traditional way.
When I got married, I’d been a professional for several years. I elected to take my husband’s name, and it took over a year to become accustomed to it. Now (almost four years later), even people who knew me before I got married forget. I like my husband’s name (Dailey). I’m Irish and German, but I identify with the Irish. My maiden name was German, so I got my Irish surname when I married. (Oddly enough, my hubby is NOT Irish - he’s Italian.)
My college roommate is a doctor. When she got married, she took her husband’s name (he’s also a doctor, and also a pediatrician.) She uses his name socially, and her maiden name professionally, both because her patients already know it and to avoid the confusion there would be at having two doctors with the same, fairly uncommon, name.
I have several relatives actually that when they married kept their maiden names for professional purposes and use their married names regularily. Otherwise it would get confusing having 2 lawyers in the family with the same last name.
One of my aunts had to teach me her married name because it’s very weird. It’s Lithuanian (her husbands parents immigrated here) and she taught me to say it as remember it like “grey ows kiss” (Grajauskas).
I don’t know what I’d do if I ever got married but most likely I would take my husbands name. I’ve never really liked my name and actually considered changing it to my Mom’s maiden name. But that would be confusing since then I would have the same name as my Nanny (I was named after both my Grandma’s so if I go by my ‘real’ first name we get confused and if I changed it to my Mom’s maiden name since I almost always go by my middle name it would be the same as my other Grandma’s)
I think you should go by whatever name you like and feel most comfortable with.
I didn’t change my name after I got married, partly for professional reasons and partly because I am the last of my family line - there will be no one with my last name any more after I die. So the name’s gonna stick around as long as possible! I really don’t think most men mind, once they get used to the idea - though there is a danger at times that your husband will be called by your last name, and it took mine awhile to get used to that - he now comes when called by it, however :).
We never planned to have kids, but if we did we probably would just go ahead and have my husband’s last name as theirs. Hyphenating would be awkward, and I’ve mixed feelings on using my last name as their given middle name. It would preserve the name, but my current given middle name is a family surname and I HATE it! I grew up in a time when all the other girls’ middle names seemed to be either Marie or Suzanne, and I got stuck with a real honker in comparison :D!
This is gonna sound stupid, but here it comes anyway… My ex kept her last name (for no particular reason), and it was fine with me. As far as I was concerned, we were going to be together forever, so what difference would a name make? After 6 years of marriage and a divorce, I think differently now. If I get married again, I’ll ask her to take my name. Not that it’d keep a divorce at bay, but when the chips are down, if (God forbid) she starts thinking about separating, I don’t want the “Gee, and I won’t even have to switch names 'cause I kept mine” thought swimming around making matters worse. It’s a tiny thing, I know, but I honestly believe it helps to have the same name to lend a sense of unity and family.
[sub]See? I told you it was stupid![/sub]
Wow. I thought I was going to be the only bad guy. I look at it like this: If a woman doesn’t want me enough to take my name, then she doesn’t want me enough to be my wife.
[waiting for the rabid feminists to storm my castle at midnight with pitchforks and torches…]
If she’s going to become part of me, share my finances and my debts, share ownership of everything either of us has, and help raise children, then she can go the full 9 and take my name too. I also don’t believe in prenuptual agreements (I see it as planning to fail).
Call me sexist or old-fashioned or whatever you like, but if you’re not planning to get married to me, then you don’t need to worry about it, do you?
Well, I don’t marry men who use the phrase “rabid feminists,” so you’re right, I don’t have to worry about it. But I have to ask: Would you be willing to take her name instead? If so, no problem. If not, why do you think it’s reasonable to expect your partner to do something you wouldn’t do yourself?
Oh, come now, the logic works the same in the other direction. Why not take your wife’s name?