I have a post on A Practical Wedding today about how easy it was to decide to change my name…until I realized I’d also be changing my domain name. Some of this you’ve heard before, but I also elaborated a bit more in the post on how I made the decision to change my name.
Though I mostly focused on my relationship with my dad and how our relationship affected my decision, that wasn’t the only factor. (The fact that I lisp every time I introduce myself was another. It’s not something that I have to think about on the Internet, but I hate it in real life.) I also didn’t mention some other aspects of the name change. Like the fact that in the house I grew up in, we had four women and three different last names. Or the fact that my mom and I had often discussed changing our last names to something new and totally different when I was in my late teens/early twenties. She, too, had thought about shedding her married name, and when my brother was born, she was faced with the dilemma of what his last name should be. He was not in any way a Wilkerson. Should she give him her maiden name and return to it herself? We talked about it a lot, and one day I realized that the middle name she was planning to give him, which was the first name of my grandmother’s brother and her own brother’s middle name, was actually a common last name. So I suggested she make that his last name instead of his middle name, and it just made a kind of sense. Around the same time, my aunt got married to a guy who no longer spoke to his family and she and my new uncle chose a new last name together that meant something to them. But then there’s my grandma, who still goes by her married name, even though she got divorced in the 1970s and no one can pronounce the name. And my mentor, who chose a fabulous new last name for herself after she got divorced, a name she kept after she got remarried. And my coworker; he and his wife kept their names when they got married, and their son has her name. All these people helped me realize that last names do matter, but they are also quite fluid.
That said, there are still things about name changing that make me queasy. I’m not looking forward to the first time Eric and I get something addressed to “Mr. and Mrs. His First Name His Last Name;” for some reason, that makes me uncomfortable in a way that taking his last name does not. And I’m not going to argue that I’m making the most feminist choice by keeping my name; I’ve read enough feminist discussion on this topic to be convinced that yeah, keeping my last name probably would have been the “most feminist” thing to do. But…I can’t do something that’s completely inauthentic to me just to advance the cause; the best I can do is make a decision that feels right for me and then go to bat for any woman who chooses to keep her name or man who chooses to change his.
Sometimes, in my more sentimental moments, I miss my dad and feel a little sad and guilty that I don’t want to keep his last name. And then I remember that he was actually a junior, and he hated that. He had a bad relationship with his father, and being called “Eddie” made his skin crawl because it was what everyone called his dad. So…I think he’d understand. That said, I don’t like the idea of completely erasing my relationship with him from my name, because, painful as it may be, it’s part of who I am today and I can’t erase it from my life. Lately I’ve been leaning toward making “Wilkerson” my middle name after I get married as a small and less conspicuous way to represent this part of me, but I haven’t decided yet.
One of the things I’ve learned in the past year is that weddings are a really amazing tool for self-reflection and learning more about the family you came from. (I could go on and on about this, and I will, another day.) So while I sometimes feel annoyed that women bear the brunt of the last-name-changing anxiety, in my more optimistic moments, I see myself as really lucky that I have an excuse to deal with family legacy and personal identity through my wedding. Had I not met the person I planned to marry by now, I’m fairly confident I would have gone through this process anyway and just taken my brother’s name as my last name too (and encouraged my mom to do the same), probably to coincide with some other big life moment, like turning 30. There was another post on A Practical Wedding regarding name changes that touches on why you might desire to change your name as you grow up that I loved. The author wrote:
“Plenty of cultures allow (or even require) people to assume new names upon rites of passage to mark their new identities (see Catholic Confirmations, Buddhist Shinbyu ceremonies, fraternity initiations, and so on). I know many women choose to keep their given names because they feel that those names are tightly woven into their identities. But my given name almost feels like a cocoon I need to shed to feel truly independent and self-sufficient in this world. I’m going to be doing a whole lot of transcending in the months leading up to and after the wedding, while assuming a bunch of new identities — college graduate, wife, badass independent adult — and I want a new symbolic identity to match. Marriage just gives me a good legal excuse to do so.”
I get the feeling of shedding a cocoon and I’m glad I have the excuse to do so. I wish men and people who aren’t married had the excuse to do so too, because I really believe that examining your personal family history and adult identity is a worthwhile experience. I initially really resented the name change conversation and the touchy issues it raised, but now I’m actually really grateful to have gone through it.
Read Changing Your Name in the Age of Google on A Practical Wedding
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I just wrote about my name change a couple of weeks ago. It took me 3 years to legally make the change, and while I claimed I stalled because we were living abroad and I hate paperwork, the real reason was an insecurity about my identity. Once I came to understand that the name change would be a daily commitment/reminder to my marriage – it became quite a lot easier to head to the Social Security office.
Anne Taite recently posted..Change of Pace
This is a great post, really thought provoking. My mother never changed her name when she got married and when I was growing up everyone either called her Mrs. My-Last-Name or assumed they were divorced. But aside from that mild annoyance I never really gave it much thought until I was older.
A few months ago someone asked me whether I would change my last name if my boyfriend and I got married – And after my defense mechanism rant against actually getting married {oh the joys of being 30 and unmarried} I actually gave the question some thought.
I like his last name – Fowler – but ultimately I decided that my name is me, it’s part of my identity, and since I’m not having children I’ll be the last Shreve for my family {My brother is taking his fiance’s last name!}
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I can’t wait to change my name when I get married. I wish I could do it now. A new name offers such a fresh start and a nice change, I am so ready for it.
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“So while I sometimes feel annoyed that women bear the brunt of the last-name-changing anxiety, in my more optimistic moments, I see myself as really lucky that I have an excuse to deal with family legacy and personal identity through my wedding.” This perfectly summarizes my feelings about changing my name! Well put.
I was one of the people who wondered about your decision, and I’ve been waiting for this post.:)
I don’t want to change my name, but I’ve realised that our views actually aren’t so different. I *already* changed my name, at sixteen. My current name is one that I *chose*, that I’ve built an identity with, that means me and only me, and I love it. I love the fact that I am Ms Kali J. Ravel. I don’t want to be anyone else. I didn’t feel that way about being Miss Klyssima E. Parmer, or Miss Klyssi Roberts.
:)
If I could do it all again, I’d probably do what you did! Like I said, I think more people could probably benefit from going through this change and thinking long and hard about their name/identity, and doing outside of the context of a relationship sounds like it would probably make things a bit easier.
I love that this conversation keeps coming up (and that you keep it going). The identity in a last name has definitely been something I’ve dealt with my whole life. When my parents divorced when I was seven, my mom seriously considered returning to her maiden name, and my sister and I desperately wanted that to be our last names too. (Side note: I went through an identity crises with my first name too when I was eight or nine–and my mom was awesome and totally went along with what I wanted to be called.)
I spent a solid decade hating my last name. I hated that it attached me to the man who I thought abandoned me, and I hate that it attached me to his siblings who really didn’t have a great reputation. I always looked forward to the day I could change my last name.
But now, the thought of completely shedding that last name kind of depresses me. It’s part of who I am. It’s a unique name. It’s attached to everything I’ve written so far. And now that my dad and I have built a better relationship, I don’t hate the name anymore.I don’t know if I can completely ditch it.
I know when I get married, I definitely want to take on Josh’s last name. I feel like it’s the best way to symbolize our two lives becoming one. (Plus I really like his last name!) I’ve considered hyphenating our last names or just having two last names. It didn’t even occur to me that I could make my last name a middle name. (Though I definitely wouldn’t ditch my middle name–it has more meaning than my last name!) And we haven’t discussed whether he might want to take on my name too. I think when the time comes to make that decision, Josh and I will have a lot to talk about.
Thanks, again, for bringing up this discussion.
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I recently got married and I decided to change my name to his last name.
I never liked the way my last name sounded growing up.
But, it did make me cringe when people said Mr. and Mrs. HisFirstName HisLastName. Most often it is because they think I will like it! But oh…it drives me crazy.
This has been a long struggle for me in my 20s. At 21 and engaged, I didn’t want to change my name, but tried to compromise. I attempted to use two last names, no hyphen – but “Souza Thordarson” is cumbersome and horrible. Anyone who had the decency to acknowledge both names hyphenated it for me, and most people just called me Jacki Thordarson, which … is not me!! Even my university’s alumni department listed me as Thordarson, despite the fact that I never requested the change, and never legally changed my name. Eventually I told him “sorry but no” and reverted to only using Souza.
Matt and I have discussed it quite a bit. My plan now is to change my middle name to Souza, and take his last name, which is easier to spell and say correctly (though … I really don’t think Souza is hard). My middle name has no real meaning to me, but my last name does – it’s my father’s name, my mother’s name, my sisters’ name and it has been both of my living grandparents’ name. For me, it’s not just “my father’s name” it truly is “my family’s name” and I feel more connected to it than I do to my 1984-tastic middle name.
So now I’ll go read your post and probably have things to say about the “age of Google” aspect of it all, because my recent URL change was definitely 100% related to that. :)
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I love the last name Souza! You come with your own marches (wait, do you hate that?!)
I took my husband’s name, and since we have been married, people have tried to hyphenate it, but the only person who has ever addressed something to me under his name is my Grandmother, and I can cut her some slack for that.
However, about 2.5 years in, I find myself wishing we’d both changed our names to something new together.
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I took my husband’s last name when we got married and I’m happy I did. I struggled with the decision and debated changing my middle name to my maiden name, but ultimately decided to use my maiden name (a fairly common first name) as a name for one of our future children. It might sound corny, but it felt like a nice way to merge the two together.
For years, I was looking forward to getting married someday because then I could change my ultra common last name (Johnson). But, then I got over it and realized that it was really nice that no one ever asked me how to spell any part of my common name.
When I got engaged, I didn’t think twice about changing my last name to his. I’m a bit of a traditionalist in some aspects, but mostly I just love him so much that I wanted to share that with him. And, I would share a name with only TWO other women instead of hundreds or thousands, according to Google searches. Of course, I’ll have to tell people how to spell it all the time now. And, if I’m being really honest, I don’t love the way my new name sounds together; too many THs in it, but I’m sure I’ll get used to it.
We got married this weekend and the hardest part for me is trying to figure out when to use my maiden name and when to use his last name during this transition, until I have all of the paperwork done!
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So many feelings about this. I grew up with my dad’s last name, which was a shortened version of the original Italian. My grandfather and his brothers changed their last name, not at Ellis Island, but after WWII to seem less Italian and more American. My mom married in her early 20s and changed her last name to help her husband (French) immigrate. When they divorced, she kept his name. My middle name was her maiden name and my favorite of all the last names. However, growing up in the 80s, I hated having my mom have a different last name (it was less common then) and hated even more that it wasn’t her maiden name but another husband’s name. I get why she did it – by the time she married my dad in her late 30s, she was already established in a career with this name. But you explain that to a kid.
When I got married, I changed my name immediately – I was entering graduate school and I wanted everything to be seamless with a new name. Plus my married name was a lot easier than the bastardization of that original Italian name. Then, 1.5 years after my wedding, I was coming out as lesbian and getting divorced. I was still early in my grad career and there was no way I wanted to keep my ex’s last name. My partner convinced me to go back to the original Italian. She’s Italian too and she said, if we ever got married, she would change her name too. That sold me. Until I had to spell my name over the phone for the first time (“lower case d – i, space, capital B as in boy…). And now she has several publications and diplomas with her name (which is also significantly easier to spell) and she’s not changing her name. Also, while I know it meant a lot to my grandfather that I changed back to the original name – I feel more disconnected from my dad’s (very large) family. We’ve only become more close since then (for various reasons). They all grew up super close and I was more an outsider. Now that we’re becoming closer, I don’t know, having a different name makes me feel more outsider-y. If I had to do it over? I would have never changed my last name in the first place. But hindsight is 20-20 and this is small as far as regrets go.
This is an incredibly complicated issue that I’ve been giving a lot of thought. To jump to the conclusion: I think I’m going to hyphenate my name.
On my end, I’m not close to my family. My father and I have had a rocky relationship since I can first remember, and I feel no real tie to my surname. It goes even beyond that, though, because my surname is actually my grandmother’s second husband’s name. It’s not even the surname my father was born with. My grandmother and my dad changed their names when my grandmother remarried. So it’s a name that connects me to no one but my grandmother. my father, my mother, and my sister, and no history at all except that of my grandmother’s rocky marriages. My name (Jane Lawrence) is also very common. There were three in my hometown of 60,000 when I was growing up. I’m not even the first academic Jane Lawrence that shows up in Google searches. But I have grown sort of attached to the name and its commonness, in a way.
My boyfriend’s surname is less common, but also has an odd history. He too is not particularly close to his parents, and his surname is not the one he was born with, because he was adopted and changed his name as a child. His name, too, does not really tie him to a family history, because of the adoption.
What ends up winning out here is that I’m in academia and I’m published under my surname. If I changed it, my Google Scholar searches would be screwed up, and my CV would be a bit more confusing. If I took my surname as my middle name (and I’m not big on my middle name and have contemplated changing it before), it would still probably screw up my Google Scholar searches and alphabetization. But I don’t really want to just keep my name. So, by process of elimination, I’ve come to hyphenation.
Name-changing is a weird issue in academia because of the publication and professional bit, and preferences seem to vary by age cohort. Most of the academics I know in their thirties and forties did not change when they married, regardless of publication history. And the academics I know who are in their twenties almost exclusively do change their names, again, regardless of publication history.
I feel like this makes me a terrible woman, but I never considered NOT taking my husband’s name. It doesn’t even bother me when our grandmothers send mail to Mr. & Mrs. Hisfirst Ourlast. The first time I saw it, my heart soared a little bit. I don’t hate my original family name; I actually quite like it. I never dreamed of the day I’d get married and have a husband and never doodled anyone elses last name alongside mine. But when the time came, deciding to take his name was immensely easy. I love that we’re known in town as The Hilkers.
Unfortunately, we’re now six months after the wedding and my name is only partially officially changed. My mother and I were purchasing a small business around the same time I got married and legally changing my name in the middle of the busines purchase was a paperwork *nightmare.* It certainly would have been easier to keep my maiden name. I now have to stop myself and say either my maiden last name (business or financial) or married last name (everything else). I can’t WAIT for the actual name change to be done.
Honestly, the hardest change…..? My email address! I still use my college ID as my email address which, of course, has my maiden name in it. I reeeeeally don’t want to let it go! Now that I think about it, my friends also almost exclusively call me a nickname from my old last name. I guess even once it’s gone on paper, it will always stick around.
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This is a really interesting topic. I’m not engaged (yet), but it’s definitely something I’ve thought about. My last name and BF’s last name are incredibly similar. Kahl (pronounced Cal) and Kile (pronounced Kyle). I haven’t thought of the idea of him taking my name, but since his last name is like a third first name, maybe he should. Doubtful. Hyphenating would sound ridiculous, but I do have a friend who combined his and his wife’s last names with a hyphen (hers first), and they both changed their names. I thought that was sweet.
I also really like my middle name (Daye) and considered taking that and dropping my last name when I marry, but I was raised mostly by my Dad and would feel guilty dropping it. If I do marry, I will probably end up taking the BF’s last name. I have no problem with that idea- expect they’re so similar, I’ll probably feel like I’m just saying my own last name– with a southern accent.
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I adore both this post & comments and the APW post & comments. I have several qualms about my not-so-fluid sounding name, but I dig that I’m one of a few (or only, according to Facebook, Twitter, Google) who have this name. I find my identity is often more shaped by the names other call me than by my given name. In writing, in professional settings, in signature and in my introductions I am always Melanie — but to my friends it’s Mel and I always feel like someone is close to me when they call me that. I think that’s why I adopted Mel as my internet-alter-ego-true-self on blogs and social media. Anyone who is just a random acquaintance wouldn’t connect me to my formal name, but I still get to be me.
As for rearranging my mouthful of a first+middle+last name one day? I don’t have a real reason to think about it yet and I think one of the things I loved most about your APW post is seeing where you were when you bought your domain name is exactly where I am in life right now. So who knows what greatness the next 2/3 years can bring…:)
I’m a Melanie too – I don’t encounter too many others. I actually have a post coming on Saturday about my name as part of a Writing Group exercise. I make the same point you do, sort of – no one calls me Melanie (except professionally) so I have an identity that isn’t really attached to my given name.
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I love reading your thoughts on this, Rachel. It’s such a hard choice, but it sounds like you’ve made a decision that rings true for you (both for your name and your URL!).
I wonder if I would have taken my husband’s name if my first husband hadn’t been SUCH A DICK about the whole thing. After that experience, I am clinging tight to my maiden name! Thankfully, my husband supports me on this decision. We’re still discussing what to do when we have kids. Discussing, like grown ups, so it’s all good. Marital win right there.
Hyphenating our kids’ names is off the table for us. I’ve always thought it was a bit obnoxious, but at least fair. However, one of my classmates recently told me that his son’s hyphenated name has been a nightmare for them. Doctor’s offices wouldn’t write it properly on claims, and insurance would reject the claims. Good to know. We won’t go that route.
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I changed my name when I got married and I don’t like getting the “Mr. and Mrs. Hisname” mail. I prefer Him and Her Lastname – which is what we used during our ceremony and how I wanted to address our invitations, but after some pushback from our parents we went with the more traditional wording.
The part that I struggle with is how to get the word out about how I want to be addressed – especially to the older generation who see the “Mr. and Mrs.” as having a level of respect associated with it.
Another great post! And the best argument I’ve heard for name changing. I totally get the lisp, I’ve got two S’s in my name, and my work title, which I use all day long throws in another 4 S’s! My husband’s name, on the other hand, has no S’s, but is a bitch for American’s to pronounce.
Yet, I never changed my name, because I saw it as who I am, and that’s not something that would change with marriage. But, now that you talk about the idea of evolution, and moving into new life stages, it makes sense. (Although, I’d still only do it if he were to do it, too.) =)
I love seeing different people’s opinions on this, because there’s simply so many opinions! Personally, if I ever get married, I don’t plan on changing my last name. I LOVE how my first and last name sound together, it’s a name people remember, and I finally feel like I’ve really started to grow into it and own it, if that makes sense. That being said, however, I wouldn’t be opposed to changing my middle name to my husband’s last, or even middle, name. I don’t really care for my middle name like my first and last, and I do like the idea of both partners taking the other’s name, or coming up with a new one for the both of them.
Also, I do like how you addressed how some people perceive taking your husband’s name as the “less-feminist” thing to do. As far as I’m concerned, feminism is about giving women the freedom and choice to choose what’s right for themselves, not anyone else. So as long as you’re doing what you want and what makes you happy, I’d say that makes it a totally feminist thing to do. :]
I grew up in a family where my mom did not change her name when she married my dad. As a kid, that was a bit weird for me, but as an adult, I definitely get it.
When I got married, I really struggled with the name change aspect, and it caused me a lot of anxiety. I wanted to be part of my husband’s “family,” but I was sad about “giving up” my own father’s name. I didn’t want to hyphenate for various reasons and, in the end, I legally adopted my maiden name as my middle name (which caused a little angst, too, because my given middle name is my grandmother’s name, and I adore her). I try to pass it off as a Southern thing, but the truth is, I couldn’t bear to part with my father’s name.
A year and a half later, though, I still sometimes accidentally sign credit card receipts with MDMaidenName.
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