Lauren has an interesting post up about how women go about deciding whether or not to change the their names upon getting married. The discussion going on in the comments is worth checking too.
It interested me because, as a gay man, there really aren’t any “rules” for what to do when we establish ourselves as a couple (i.e. got married). I’ve seen some couples hyphenate their names. We considered hyphenating our names for about a minute, but it really didn’t make sense for us. Both the hubby and I wanted/needed to keep our names for proffessional reasons; the hubby as a doctor, and me as a writer I’ve seen some couples where one takes the other’s name. Asethecially, I didn’t think his surname (of Lithuanian extraction) was a good fit with my first name. In some cases, I’ve heard of couples where both legally adopt a completely different surname from their original ones. To me, that throws a monkey-wrench into geneaology, and both harken back to the issues of keeping one’s name for professional reasons.
Then there was the question of what to do about the kids’ last names. Whose surname would they have. Would we hyphen? I’ve seen some couples do that, but I kinda figured that would really give the kids problem if/when they get married and have to make the same decision, with with two or more surnames instead of one. (What do you do if your last name is already hyphenated? Keep it? Hyphenate again?) Since I wasn’t particularly concerned with the kid having my last name, and because it all sounded good together, we decided Parker (and most likely the next kid too) would have my last name as a middle name, and the hubby’s as a surname.
So, what do other people do? Which of the the options would/did you choose? And why?
The entirety of my decision of whether to change my name was based on this: 1) Do I like the way my new name would sound? 2) Does he care whether I change my name?
If the answer to #1 was yes and the answer to #2 was no, I would change it. They were, so I did.
We thought about it for about a half second and then said fuckit.
Don’t know what we would do if we had kids. When we got together we each wrote a list of what we wanted out of our lives together. On both lists #1 was all caps. NO CHILDREN. That pretty well cleared the air and ended that problem. And make no mistake I LOVE children….Just as long as I can give them back.
When my husband and I got married, we talked about names and what was important to each of us. My extremely cool husband said he didn’t have strong feelings: he’d be happy to hyphenated, he’d be proud to have me take his name, and he’d be just as proud to take mine, if it was important to me. We ultimately decided to each keep our own names, for a number of reasons.
We have worked together professionally on several occasions, and it has worked out to be extremely convenient to have casual acquaintances not realize that we are married.
…it also appeals to our spy-natures.
We hyphenate socially, but our legal names are still our birth names. And I answer to “Mrs X” and he answers to “Mr Y” when people assume we share the same name.
The whole discussion reminds me of Funny Girl, and Omar Sharif’s character chafing when everyone assumed he was “Mr. Bryce” as Fanny Bryce’s husband.
Once it’s legal for us to marry in NYS, I’m taking his last name. It’ll be interesting to see the reaction a Black man with a Chinese last name gets!
There wasn’t much chance of us changing our names (hassle!) when we married, but I’ve often wondered what to do with our kids’ last names in the future. We both have LONG surnames. Hyphenation is aesthetically, and practically, stupid for us. I figure we’ll just make one a middle and one a last, but how to decide? Hers is recognizably “ethnic”, therefore less common. We like uniqueness, but it’s not always best.
At any rate, it’ll be like 22 letters of middleandlastname. better pick a real short firstname!