Sure it is. I’m just wondering about irrelevant deal breakers. And isn’t an insistence that she keep her name just as bad as one that she take his name? It’s her name, after all. I’d say some guy upset about being insulted by a woman not taking his name and a guy upset because his future wife is insufficiently feminist (in a superficial sense) are just as bad.
When we got married – well, actually, before we got married – I told her that whatever she wanted to do with respect to her name was fine with me. Keep it, take mine, hyphenate, no problem. She ultimately went with the traditional practice.
Although, if we’re talking tradition, my grandmother was always Mrs. Grandfatherfirstname Grandfatherlastname. God help you if you ever addressed her as Mrs. Herfirstname Grandfatherlastname.
What I took away from CairoCarol’s post is that her husband would be much more likely to fall in love with a woman with her own strong identity. Sounds good to me. Seeing how emotional people in this thread can get over the name issue says it’s a potential hot-button that can tie into some pretty deeply held beliefs, so it’s a good thing to be on the same page with your mate.
In my case, my husband and I chose a last name we both liked that belonged to neither of us originally and both changed our names. Our married name came baggage-free and worked perfectly well, as we didn’t like our own original last names or each others’. There was very little drama on both sides of the family about it.
I kept my name. It was, and is, the one thing I’ve had in the exact same form since the day I was born. Giving up part of it was simply not an option, so the choice was between leaving things alone and hyphenating. DoctorJ did offer the comment that he always like the “compromise” of ditching your middle name instead of the last name, but otherwise stayed out of it.
Ultimately, it boiled down to there really not being any upside to me hyphenating–he wasn’t willing to change anything, so we’d still have different names, and I’d have all the hassle and annoyance of doing all the paperwork. It just seemed overall much simpler to leave the whole mess alone, and 7 years out it still seems much simpler. We’ve never had any issue with the mortgage or filing taxes jointly or people assuming we’re shacking up (though in all fairness, there are precious few people who it matters to me that they know we’re married, and all of them were at the wedding). One insurance company wanted to see our certificate before putting me on his policy, but that was a matter of faxing one piece of paper. I’ve had a harder time renewing my car registration.
What I took away from it was the implied criticism of women who **do ** change their names (which you have also done - my identity is no weaker than any of the women in this thread who didn’t change their names).
My mother changed her name after 10 years of marriage because it was becoming annoying to her to explain that “yes these are my children”, and “yes I am married” and “yes to the kids father” and “no he is an army officer and definatly not emasculated and effeminate”.
I remember her being stopped once at an airport to explain the difference in her and my last name and in those pre mobile phone days she had to call my father to explain stuff.
What was the final straw for her was when she was attempting to procure insurance and the agent thought she was adding the flavour of the month as a benficiary. I believe another poster had a similar experience.
Voyager, as I wrote in my initial post, my husband said, “It’s your choice, but to tell the truth I can’t imagine falling in love with a woman who wouldn’t want to keep her own name.”
He never said “I am telling you that you must make a certain choice or I will not marry you.” He simply expressed agreement with the choice I wanted to make, and indicated that for him it was such a defining issue that he’d probably not fall in love with someone who didn’t share his beliefs.
As for this criterion being “irrelevant,” it is irrelevant to you. That’s fine – I wouldn’t dream of insisting that it should matter to you if it doesn’t. Why can’t we just say it is irrelevant to you and relevant to me, and agree that neither of us has the right to select which criteria matter for the other person’s marital choices?
Cat Whisperer (and others), I do not understand why saying “here is a choice I made, and my husband said he couldn’t imagine falling in love with a person who didn’t make that particular choice” implies criticism of people who choose differently. Saying “I don’t think it would be a good idea for me to marry person X” is not automatically criticism of that person, just an observation about compatibility.
However, I don’t get to dictate how everyone reacts to my words. So even though I find it odd, evidence upthread shows that my words can be interpreted mean, “I believe that people who choose to have the wife take her husband’s last name upon marriage are inferior to us in some way.”
Now, having inadvertently said that, let me set the record straight:
I do not think women who take their husband’s names when they get married are inferior to me in any way whatsoever. I do not think men whose wives take their names are inferior either.
I do not wish to offend women or men who made a different choice than I did. I recognize that for many people, particularly in this day and age (far different from the era in which I grew up, when women were marginalized outside the home to an extent that would be inconceivable today), there is little to no symbolism involved and the issue is decided by default or convenience. If symbolism IS at the core of the choice, the desire to share a family name is what is key, not the feminist principles that informed my own choice but which are not of concern to many others.
Perhaps I should give him the benefit of the doubt, since he might have said this to make you happy. Your choice about names is very relevant to you, and your choice alone. I trust that there have been times in your marriage where one person supported a choice by the other that they didn’t necessarily agree with. But I still don’t get why a woman’s choice of name being a dealbreaker for any man, one way or another. How would you have felt if he said he wouldn’t fall in love with any woman who would wear a cream wedding dress.
That’s why I turned it around. I suspect you’d find a guy who said that he’d only fall in love with a woman who would take his name obnoxious. I would also. But it is possible to be as feminist and change names as not. It sounds like his beliefs include the idea that a woman should never change names - which I find rather controlling. But like I said, perhaps he just wanted you to be happy. People have done a lot worse,
I never said it was a dealbreaker. He never said it was a dealbreaker. Remember, HE SAID IT WAS MY CHOICE.
Would it be clearer if I had summarized his remarks as:
"It is your choice what you do about your name and I love and support you regardless, but frankly I am not at all surprised that you feel strongly about keeping your own name.
"I know the life experiences that have shaped you and what this particular decision represents to you. Funnily enough, similar life experiences have shaped me and I have arrived at conclusions much like your own.
" In fact, although I am already in love with you or we wouldn’t be engaged to begin with, I think it is unlikely I’d be sitting here talking to my fiance about names unless you were saying what you are saying now. It’s just one of the many ways in which it seems to me that we are well-matched in beliefs and attitudes.
"Of course, if it turned out that you didn’t care, or you wanted to take my name, I would naturally still love you, since I have already fallen in love with you.
“And I certainly didn’t cross-examine you when we met so I could eliminate you as a potential mate if you had particular ideas about last names, nor would I ever dream of such a thing. Still, it strikes me as kind of nice that things are working out the way they are. Why, I bet we will still be married in 30 years and you’ll be using some future version of Darpanet to defend my views to other people!”
That would be a fuller characterization of his half of our discussion (except for the last sentence. ;)). I was just, you know, trying to describe his position on the matter more briefly.
That is, quite honestly, a really stupid comparison. When was the last time you saw someone introduce themselves as Jennifer-who-wore-a-cream-wedding-dress? Or put their wedding dress color choice on an official form to open a bank account or pay taxes or adopt a shelter dog? Or give their dress color to the hostess at a restaurant when waiting for a table? Or explain that they just wouldn’t feel like a real family if they wore a cream wedding dress? I’m guessing you have never seen any of those things happen, ever. Your last name is a commentary on your identity that you carry with you and use every single day for the rest of your life, and dress color is a commentary on your complexion that you use one day and then nobody but you ever thinks about it again. Trying to equate the two is disingenuous.
Frankly, I find the attempt to be rather patronizing and insulting. It implies that someone’s name–their identity, the outward expression of their sense of self, the label the whole rest of the world uses for them–is as trivial as the color of a dress they’ll wear once and that nobody else will ever remember. And don’t get me started on using such a comparison to bag on someone’s spouse and marriage…“poor form” is the tip of the iceberg.
For Og’s sake, the man is every bit as entitled to his opinion as any of the rest of us. Yes, what he said was a little judgmental, but no more so than saying he couldn’t imagine falling in love with someone who voted Republican. Nobody would be hopping up and down about what a judgmental, controlling dick he is if he’d said that. No, it would be accepted because political differences are accepted as a valid compatibility issue because they indicate a different and often incompatible way of looking at the world. Name issues, which are ultimately perception of personal identity issues, are indicative of different and often incompatible ways of looking at the world, too. Especially in historical context–the further back you go, the more not changing your name becomes a Statement about your personal beliefs.
My mother did not change her surname; she didn’t have strong feelings about it either way, but for her, the default for not having strong feelings about it was just to leave it be. My sibling and I ended up taking our father’s last name; in our case, I am really glad there was no hyphenation going on, or else it would have sounded really ridiculous.
I am surprised to read about how so many people have had logistical problems with that. My family had done quite a bit of international travel when I was a kid, and my mom never had trouble at the airport. No one was skeptical of her relation to me when she needed to pick up health docs from my doctor, chaperoned my school field trips with a name tag that did not have my last name, etc. For what it’s worth, it wasn’t as if my sibling and I could not see us as a family if we didn’t all have the same last name. And when I looked at the donation page for my high school several years ago, I saw lots of families listed where the women kept her maiden name (it may be the demographics, though: lots of women professionals, CEO’s, etc).
I’ll echo what some of the other posters have suggested. If you aren’t sure, you don’t have to take action right away. Think about it and make the changes (if any) when you are ready.
The long and deeply misguided journey to feminism (sic) begins with a single step. Keeping your own name would be your first step.
From there, you might possibly find offense in this remark, or that joke, or this comment. Aha, you would claim! Yet another miserable misogynist.
Yes, yes, men are all pigs, and women all perfect in every way. Ask any feminist.
I have a dear friend who married a woman so intelligent, so independent, she began feminist leanings. He gave her more than a man should give.
She demanded too much, and he would never say “no.”
He provided for their family. She earned practically nothing.
And yet, and yet he had to wash his own clothes. Washing HIS clothes was beneath her feminist dignity.
She and I got into heated arguments with the greatest of ease, for she kept pushing, pushing, and I would never concede to nonsense. Her beloved husband did.
And so my hopeful future bride, consider this, the words of a feminist who called into a radio talk show one afternoon.
She said “If you treat your husband like a king, he’ll treat you like a queen. My mother told me that and I found it to be true.”
Another beautiful woman, a secretary in my former office, said her grandmother gave her this advice:
“If you don’t take care of your man, somebody else will.”
Take his name. Love him. Be a woman after his own heart.
Feminists are miserable souls. Miserable I tell you.
Take Gloria Allred please!
[Moderator Note]Take your off-topic anti-feminist rant to The BBQ Pit.[/Moderator Note]
I would consider him not a suitable person for CairoCarol (or me) to marry. That doesn’t make him evil or wrong.
Man, I couldn’t WAIT to change my name. I traded in a long, irritating hard-to-spell name for a short, sweet common noun that everyone can spell. It’s been most excellent. In a way, I felt like I was leaving behind the mistakes of my past. New marriage, new name, new life, new me. Wheeee!
I’m still working on getting it changed with a few irritating organizations… interestingly, or maybe not, the government organizations did it best and fastest, while businesses have the hardest time. My worst offenders are State Farm, PADI, and my health insurance. They all still call me by my maiden name, despite repeat requests/forms/paperwork snafus.
Precisely.
I think this is probably where much of the discord in this thread arises from.
For some, their name is an integral part of their identity. For others, it’s not. My birth name is not a name I picked. It’s a name I was given. It was my father’s name, not one I chose because it had some sort of significance to me.
My true sense of self or my identify comes from characteristics innate to me, or from choices I have made or things I have done. It has nothing to do with my name. And it’s erroneous and a bit offensive for people (some of whom have posted to this thread) to equate changing your name to a weak sense of identity. For some, like me, it’s just a name.
What bugs me is the implication that you can assume something about a woman because she took her husband’s name. That may have been the case 30 years ago (I was 8 at the time, so I don’t really know :)) It’s certainly not the case now. What also bugs me is the underlying assumption that a woman who takes her husband’s name is somehow less of a feminist. That has not been true in my experience.
I am a feminist. I pursued higher education at my own expense, got my professional degree, and made sure I could support myself and any children I might have before I got married. When I practiced law, I volunteered my time at a free legal clinic which assisted low income and immigrant women with all sorts of issues - separation and divorce, criminal matters, child custody, immigration, and landlord tenant disputes. I also took a number of pro bono cases, most of which had to do with women who were abused or disadvantaged. I donate my time and my money to women’s shelters and various women’s and children’s charities in my city.
To assume that I’m a certain type of woman because I chose to take my husband’s name is wrongheaded in this day and age. Among my circle of friends and acquaintances, about half of the women have taken their husband’s names and half have kept their own. There is no characteristic or group of characteristics which would lend you to accurately predict who would and who wouldn’t.
I don’t really mean to hijack this thread any further. I guess all I can say to the OP is do what feels right to you, but as has been demonstrated here, people will make certain judgments, whether warranted or not.
I think this is where my (mild) irritation at some of the attitudes in this thread is coming from, too. I don’t self-identify as a feminist, because somewhere along the line feminism turned into another group of people who seemed to want to tell me how to live my life. I make my own decisions for each situation that arises on a case-by-case basis based on what is right for me, not on what is right for Womankind.
To all those criticizing for being high handed or the implied sexist pig. I say :p.
Most of you are probably correct that you would not have been a match for me. I am a pretty traditional type of guy, and my family name is very important to me. It is very unique and I have traced my family roots back to the 1300’s. My wife originally not wanting to take my name was perfectly okay with me. But my children bear my last name. She knew that I felt strongly about this before we married, and didn’t have a problem with it.
And I still stand by the fact that hyphenating last names is just stupid and the majority of people in the US feel that way, even if you don’t.
Oh, you’re still a feminist. Just a sensible one.