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Men Who Take Their Partners’ Names

One of my spouse’s college friends, a het woman, married a het guy who took her name. It has been years, but his mother is still bitter. I thought of it because it came up in Jessica Valenti’s new book, He’s A Stud, She’s A Slut, which I am in the middle of.

There are not many, but it happens. I could do research, but that would be hard. I’d rather let the hive-mind do it for me.

One comes readily to mind:

Jack White, who was born Gillis, and married Meg White, divorced, and pretended they were siblings until the Detroit Free Press found the paper trail. On the minus side, he’s nuts. On the plus side, he’s brilliant. (On could say the same about famous-in-Canada fiddle player Ashley MacIsaac, who is Jack White’s cousin. And who is married, but did not take his spouse’s name. And BTW, I’m not ignoring MacIsaac’s history of saying racist things and then saying he was being ironic — he’s done it and I don’t know if he’s tripped over a clue since then or not, but I won’t pretend it didn’t happen.)

I know of no list, but we can make one here.

Update:
Ashley MacIsaac had his say in comments, and I think I should be entirely fair to him. I tossed off an aside about Jack White’s connection to a Canadian fiddle master with a reputation for courting controversy. However, I didn’t feel that I could let it pass without comment that MacIsaac has said things which some folks in the past interpreted as racist. I said above that he has said these comments were irony, and he repeats that below. I had one reported incident in mind: MacIsaac’s May 1, 2003 concert. The Ottowa Citizen reported that he made remarks about an Asian woman in the audience spreading SARS. MacIsaac sued the Citizen; I don’t know the outcome. He maintains (and as far as I know, has always said) that he meant to be ironic. I wasn’t there and I have never seen a verbatim account of what he said.

I’m not assuming that MacIsaac intended anything other than he says. If my remarks above read that way, that was my error. However, the discussion of racism in the feminist blogosphere has underscored that intent is not the only question. People may say things meaning to be ironic or antiracist that are counterproductive. In a world full of racism, and in the middle of a publicity storm about SARS, it’s awfully tough for a white man to pull off a reference to an Asian woman having SARS and have the audience get the ironic intent, have it not feel for some folks like they’ve been punched in the gut. I don’t know what MacIsaac’s audience members thought, but if a friend of mine said he was going to try to pull that off, I’d say, “don’t do it, it’s bound to be a disaster.”

So, unless the comment was completely different from the reporting, I think it was a bad and mistaken shot at irony, one he should not have taken. When I said above that I don’t know if he had “tripped over a clue” since, I didn’t mean a conversion from hate to non-hate; I never had reason to believe he was a hateful person. I meant a realization that that kind of ironic approach generally doesn’t work well, that the remark generally has a negative immediate impact and that explaining the irony later does not undo all or some of the damage.

As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And sometimes with ironic remarks about racism that have the effect of unironic remarks about racism; the strong position of a lot of people I respect (and I confess I can’t find a link to what I’m looking for now, but it has been said over and over), is that saying something racist by screwing up is still saying something racist. And that’s something I hear from people who have to live with the impact, not the intent. So that’s my view.


79 thoughts on Men Who Take Their Partners’ Names

  1. I don’t know if this counts, but my partner (male, het) and I (female, het) plan on hybridizing our last names when we marry. Neither of us particularly hate our last names, so it doesn’t make sense to us to only change one last name (either mine or his). Changing both retains our family heritage and unites us as a couple symbolically…and, I guess, legally too.

  2. Oh–and my favorite example of this:

    Mayor Villaraigosa of LA was born with the last name Villar. His wife’s maiden name was Raigosa. When they got married, their last name became Villaraigosa. Too bad the hybridization doesn’t always work out so perfectly.

  3. It kinda ticks me off when I hear how pissed the man’s mother gets when either a) he takes his wifes name or b) his wife keeps her name. It’s usually the guy’s mother that I hear about getting mad, not the father, which confuses me.

    If I didn’t absolutely despise my parents, I would keep my last name when I get married. My fiance told me he would never change his last name (even though it’s extremely common), so I’m thinking about just picking a new last name when I get married, just to prove a point. What do y’all think of that?

  4. I think that’s not a bad idea at all, as an idea. I think it will become rather problematic practically given current divorce rates if people don’t have to switch back to their original surnames, which would also be weird. But as an idea, I think it’s worthwhile to consider the concept of “new family, new surname”. BTW, how did you determine the order of the hybrids? Flip coins? I mean, if taking one or the other’s name is something you’re concerned about, wouldn’t the order of the names in the hybrid be almost as problematic?

  5. I know some people who have done it. It’s not unheard of in the Wiccan community.

    My ex and I each kept our own names, and we hyphenated our son’s name, which he (our son) hates. His intention is to take his wife’s name when he marries. He’s only 18 and people change, but he’s a uniquely single-minded 18.

  6. There was no way for my wife and I to hybridize our names, so we found a name that we liked on her mother’s side of the family that had dead-ended and we both hyphenated it to the end of our original last names. When we have kids, we plan on passing on the name we share, but we’ve also retained the names that we grew up with.

    My (very conservative) family didn’t take it too well, but we lived through it.

  7. Not a famous person but I have a friend whose husband and her both changed their names to the hyphenate, with his name first and hers last, the reverse of the more common thing that usually only women do. They got married in the late mid 80s in Virginia and the guy got into a fight at the social security office because they told him “only women can change their name when they get married.” He actually had to get a lawyer to help him accomplish the change.

    I don’t know anyone who just changed his name to his wife’s. That would be pretty cool.

  8. I have some friends who did that. My wife kept her own last name and we get a lot of flack for that. We live in KY.

  9. i had hoped to, but my fiancee is burning to change her name, since it’s a common women’s first name, and her real first name is not very common. the reversals are annoying most of the tim (people who screw it up after being corrected), and really bad some of the time (not being able to find her on the patient listing at the ER).

    we’ve considered finding a family name that we connect to from our ancestors or hybridizing.

    whatever we pick, minnesota is one of the few places that offers a complete name change for both partners. you just write the previous names and the new names on the marriage certificate, and that’s pretty much it. sadly, it’s still a DOMA state, so i feel bad about getting married, period.

  10. Oh I hope this doesn’t get back to my friend.

    But a freind of mine who is a woman of color with an ethnic last name, has just gotten married to a supposedly sort of i’m-not-a-racist-i’m-dating-a-woc type dude, and he wants to take her last name. It’s pretty cool on some levels, but a few ppl worry he’s doing it to further distance himself from a white guilt thing.

    But, I could also be totally full of it.

  11. As far as the mother being mad, rather than the father: I think it must be interpreted as more of a slap at her choices. Especially if a given mother (now I’m just guessing) did think about the decision and decided one way, it’s easy to be defensive about that choice.

    A father doesn’t really have to think about it.

  12. My idea of a solution, thought of as a single 23-year-old, would be for me to keep my name, my stay-at-home-dad of a husband keep his, and possibly have the kids split names by gender (ie, girls take mine, boys take his) until they’re old enough to choose otherwise if they wish. It’s a more complicated system, certainly, but… well, part of me thinks that if a guy’s willing to accept it, it’s a good indicator of whether he’s a good fit for me. ^_^

  13. There’s Emmanuel and Marcet Haldeman-Julius, who both hyphenated their names when they got married– in 1919. Together, they published Appeal to Reason and the Little Blue Book series.

  14. My husband and I both legally added my maiden name to the middle of our names (so a second middle name for both of us) and used his last name as a last name for both of us. We did the same thing when we had children — our three each have my maiden name for a second middle name and my husband’s name for a last name. Sounds convoluted but it works for us. My mother in law was furious with me for changing his name — I was speechless when she confronted me about it the day after our wedding, left the room and sent my husband in to explain to his mother how this was his decision (obviously). It’s never been brought up again. What is it about MILs and this?

  15. I knew someone who did the some kids have her name, some kids have his. They did it because his last name was the sort of last name that gets kids teased and bullied, and one of their sons was not the sort who could easily deal with that. They’d given both kids both names originally, but enrolled the older one in school with her last name only. That was in the SF Bay Area diversity bubble, but no one blinked.

    I know several couples who both hyphenated. My husband considered changing his name because his is way common, but mine isn’t much better so we each kept the ones we had. He does answer if he’s called Mr. Mylastname, though, which is better than I do if I’m called Mrs. Hislastname.

  16. My husband offered to take my name; he genuinely expected me to take him up on that, but I wanted to take his. I have a couple of male friends who’ve done it, though.

  17. It kinda ticks me off when I hear how pissed the man’s mother gets when either a) he takes his wifes name or b) his wife keeps her name.

    My wife and I both kept our names (my first with her last would have been an ethnic clash, her first with my last would have been totally whitebread Stepford creepy), but we gave our kids her last name.

    The only person in either family who was unhappy with it was her father.

  18. My husband and I both hyphenated. It causes no end of confusion, but we wouldn’t have it any other way. His parents were really apprehensive about it before we got married, and I had a lot of relatives asking me why I wouldn’t just take his name too, but we felt pretty strongly about it.

  19. My high school history teacher took his wife’s last name. He felt a much stronger connection to her than to his family, he said. Other people made fun of him, but he was a pretty new-agey guy (very nice) and he didn’t give a damn.

  20. Here’s a new idea: what about taking your partner’s FIRST name and keeping your last name? That way, you could stay true to your feminist roots (changing last names traditionally signaled a transfer of property, the woman being the chattel), but still please your mother in law. . .

  21. Over the past year I’ve had a lot of friends get married. I always wondered about what they were doing about names, but didn’t know how to ask in a way that wouldn’t sound judgmental.

    I’m not personally planning on getting married anytime soon, but I had a conversation with my mother about names and I told her I didn’t plan on blankly taking my partner’s name. It startled her, and again, I didn’t know how to share my feelings in a way that wouldn’t seem as if I’m casting judgment for her choice.

    Insight on how to handle these situations would be appreciated.

  22. I’ve known a few couples where both partners changed their last name to something completely different that they chose together, generally a word that they found personally meaningful or descriptive of their relationship or feelings for each other. This has always been my favorite solution to the question of how to handle last names in marriage.

  23. A law school pal of mine took her husband’s surname, and he took her first name. So now she’s [her first name] [her maiden name] [his surname], and he’s [her first name] [his first name] [his surname].

    It was his suggestion, btw.

  24. Falyne, I like that system. I had a name for it a while back, but I forgot it. I don’t have much investment in the kids having my last name, and I want daughters, so hey.

    I’m not big on hyphenated names, and I’m most interested in a keep-your-own-name arrangement, but I’m very much open to options if she comes from a culture with other traditions. I quite like the Latin American system, but I’m not specifically of others…

  25. Anybody have suggestions for what unmarried folks with hyphenated last names could do? With five syllables and the hyphen, it seems very cumbersome as a second middle name for me, or a new middle name for my partner, and we’re not keen on hybridizing… oh hyphens, they are so great in theory and so non-sustainable in practice.

  26. My husband took my last name, and both his mother and his grandmother have been entirely cool with it. So it is possible. We talked about some of the other options mentioned here (I told him the only option that was off the table was me taking his name), but it ended up just being easier to have him take my name, for a number of reasons. I’ve had some people hit me with the “but YOUR name is from your father, so what’s the diff?” response. To which I usually reply, well, you gotta start somewhere. I think it’s extremely cool that my daughter will be able to say that her last name is matrilinealy descended. I’m a big proponent of it!

  27. My husband was going to take my last name, but didn’t want to deal with his family giving us crap about it. They would have viewed it as a “betrayal.” I ended up hyphenating because having a royal title for a last name amuses me, but he’s still his original last name, and I end up using it socially. He may end up changing it to the hyphen version when we have kids, but I honestly know he is too lazy to do all the paperwork for.

  28. My partner has offered to take my name when we marry, but I want to take his for no other reason than I really like his name. Plus, it’s not very common, whereas mine is really common. Also, he is an only child with no male cousins, so when he goes, so does his name, which I think is sad. Meanwhile I have a brother with two sons so the name ain’t going anywhere.

    I have thought about keeping my own name, but I like the idea of having a family name. The suggestion above about each adding my name as a middle name is a good one though – I think I might suggest it to my partner.

  29. My mother wound up changing back to her maiden name after a couple of years of having my father’s, as she just couldn’t get used to it. My father was evidently all for this, and in fact pushed for their girl children to get her last name and their boy children to get his (something he admits he read in a scifi novel, being a big geek like me), but they ended up giving both me and my brother my mother’s last name as a second middle name. I like this system a lot.

    If and when I get married I plan to either keep my last name (it’s my name, and I like it) or hyphenate with my partner’s (I like his name too, and am sort of sappy about the idea of including it in mine to indicate our relationship; at the same time, I’m not ditching my name, because my identity is not subsumed by marrying a man) . I can’t decide which order sounds better, though — maybe I can talk him into hyphenating his in the other order from me 😉 If we had kids, which is pretty unlikely, I would want to use the system my folks came up with, as I think hyphenating a kid’s name causes unnecessary strife on legal forms and in general, but I do like having both parents’ names in there.

  30. My great-grandparents did it. Also, in the former USSR, many men with Jewish or just “Jewish-sounding” last names would take the last names of their wives, to avoid hassle/persecution.

  31. My father’s last name is very, very strange, and my mother’s is extraordinarily common. When they got married, my mother replaced her middle name with her last name.

    My father, who doesn’t have a middle name to begin with, didn’t take her last name, which is unfortunate.

    I’m pretty sure I’m just going to keep mine when/if I do get married, since it’s the same deeply weird one my father brought to his marriage, and hyphenating it would be bizarre. It also happens to share beginning and ending sounds with my bf-of-five-year’s first name, which at one syllable each is quite the feat, so for him to take it would be… yes, bizarre.

  32. I had an English professor in college who, while he didn’t take his wife’s name himself, chose to give his wife’s last name to their daughter. He had no end of trouble explaining to his daughter’s school teachers that he was not her stepdad, he was her real dad – she just had her mother’s name instead of his.

    I am not married, but my daughter has both mine and her father’s last names … I figure when she gets old enough, she can choose one or the other, keep them both, or merge them. Whatever she wants.

  33. I don’t plan to get married, but really the simplest and most obvious solution to me is to just keep your own names! Maybe I just don’t get the whole marriage thing, it has never appealed to me, but I don’t see the need for anyone to change their names because they got married. I just don’t see the connection between the two things.

    By all means do it if you want to! Just seems a little weird to me.

  34. My husband sortof took my name. That is, when I announced I had no intention of changing my name, he said “oh I’ll just take yours then.” At our wedding, we were introduced as “Mr & Mrs. Confused.” But he was lazy, and never bothered getting his ID changed. So now he uses both names, seemingly at random. It’s funny when he tells the dentist’s receptionist “oh, maybe I’m in the system under my maiden name.” There was no discussion when my daughter was born; she has my last name.

    But I don’t want to be too smug about “bucking the system” since I almost feel we were a special case. My husband knows no one else with his last name. His father, and father’s family, have not been in his life since he was 8 months old. His mother re-married a few years ago, and while she used her first husband’s last name professionally for a few years, she retired and now only uses her second husband’s name.

  35. I don’t have that many friends getting married or already married but at least one guy took his wife’s name since his is a common one and hers isn’t and they wanted to pass on the name. It’s never ceasing to amaze me, though, that this wasn’t possible in Germany until a few years ago. We still cannot take any other family name or mix the last names to a new one. -.-

  36. It’s funny when he tells the dentist’s receptionist “oh, maybe I’m in the system under my maiden name.”

    LOL.

    I just had to say that made me laugh this morning.

  37. My parents never married so both had their own names.

    My surname is my mother’s biological mother’s surname (she’s adopted), and my middle name is her (biological grandmother’s) first name. My brother has my dad’s surname. So for a while I had a surname unique in my family – my mother later changed her own surname to her biological mother’s surname, and abandoned her adopted name.

    My bf’s family – his parents are married. His mum kept her own name, and the kids took his dad’s name. It’s not his ‘real’ surname though – his great (great?) grandfather deserted from the army and chose a fake name so as not to get caught and exectued for cowardice. My bf doesn’t like his surname – I’m not sure how much of that is just because he doesn’t like the name as much as the original surname, or how much of it is because he subconsciously associate it with cowardice and being less ‘manly’.

    I like my surname – it’s a good strong Scottish name, and I get compliments on it! When I was the only one in my family with my surname, I was teased – kids saying I must be adopted or a foundling, etc, so I defended myself and my name and I’m proud of it!

    If we ever have kids, they’re getting my surname. I’m kind of glad the bf doesn’t like his surname because it means they is no disagreement over this. If I have to carry it inside me for 9 months, give birth to it, and breastfeed it then there is absolutely no way it would have any name other than mine!

    We’re never getting married, but if he wanted to take my name (maybe if/when we had kids, to have a family name), I wouldn’t mind. It’d be weird though! I quite like his surname. If he wants to keep it, change back to the ‘original’ surname, or take mine – I don’t mind. It’s his choice.

    If he was the kind of person who’d get upset about me not taking his name, or not giving our potential kids his name, he wouldn’t be my boyfriend. Feminist boyfriends rock!

    (Sorry, that’s a really long and boring comment – why would anyone care about the foibles of my family and our surnames?!)

  38. My husband took my last name, it was his choice. The only thing his dad every did for him was give him his last name so it had a lot to with that, and he is more connected with my family then with his own. I am constantly reminded of the issues in our society about this, listening to him explain to random people on the phone that he did this, like when he is giving emergency contacts for his parents or my parents and having to explain the whole last name things again and again to strangers.

  39. My mum changed her name to her mum’s maiden name when she and my dad got divorced. I think that is cool.

    I have NO intention of changing my name if I get married.
    Even though it is quite unusual and I get fed up of spelling it out over the phone.
    (If…I am not sure about the whole concept of marriage at all, but that is a whole other discussion).
    Hyphenated names just sound too middle-class Islington Guardian-reading ethical soya latte (sorry, I am from the UK so that probably won’t mean a lot to non-UK readers…which I know is most of them… basically what I mean is middle-class, white and pretentious :-))
    Also it is kind of …longwinded and clunky.
    And some moronic person on the other end of the phone is bound to think it’s one name – to be fair, I had a teacher who had a hyphenated name when i was very young, like 8, and didn’t understand the concept, so I spent a year thinking he was Mr Jonesmith, not Jones-Smith (not his real name, obv.)

    So I am keeping my name. I would have no problem with the guy taking mine, or he can keep his, it’s his decision.

    As for kids…dunno…I really don’t know cos I don’t like hyphen names but the girls having my name and boys his name would just totally confuse everyone! Duh…siblings…but…different name. Does not compute.

    Maybe they could all have a different last name…mine, his, my mother’s maiden name, his mother’s…ick, not that I want 4 though.

    Actually – just the mum having a different last name from the kids confuses people. Wilfully, it seems. I only have one friend with a kid but her doctor’s receptionist got really strange about it saying it “confused” them and “made it difficult to keep records” uh, no, it doesn’t! It’s only your tiny blinkered mind!

    *Sighs*.

    I may just do like a woman I read about and have no last name. And any kids I choose to have can do likewise.

  40. Aside from Jack White, the only “famous” instance I’ve heard of is Todd Fink (neé Baechle) from the band the Faint – he married Orenda Fink from Azure Ray and took her last name.

    I don’t think my husband would have wanted to take my name when we got married; we never even discussed that as an option. But I did keep my own name. We’re both doing artsy things (I’m a writer, he’s a comedian) and have worked under our given names before, and changing would perhaps have proved confusing later down the line.

  41. I kept my name and my husband kept his. Our kids have my last name which has led to a fair amount of confusion over the years but I wouldn’t have it any other way. Our families are used to it now but my mother was very upset about the kids’ having my name when they were little. Different last names are so common at our kids school that the school directory includes an index of kids’ names which differ from a parent.

    Our nephew and his first wife both changed their names to his recently deceased grandmother’s name but when they divorced they both went back to their original names.

  42. John Lennon changed his middle name to Ono. (Well . . . kind of. He tried to change Winston to Ono, they wouldn’t let him, but they added Ono as a secondary middle name.) So though they each always used their birth surnames for artistic purposes, they were legally John Ono Lennon and Yoko Ono Lennon. Which definitely is not the same thing as taking Yoko’s last name, but it was incredibly novel at the time (like being a “househusband”) and even as John Lennon he went through a fair amount of trouble to make it happen. And it’s about as far as one could go with a name that friggen famous.

    As for me, my husband and I each kept our last names. We considered doing the John-Yoko thing for a long time, but then I decided that I didn’t really want two last names, and we realized what a fucking hassle the whole thing would be for my husband to change his last name when we were going through the immigration process. The prospect of that nightmare sealed the deal of leaving things as is.

  43. I only know one man who changed to his wife’s name. He took a lot of crap from family and [alleged] friends, but he didn’t care and ten years later they are still going strong with three really cool kids.

    I did not take my husband’s name, nor did he take mine, and the only person who has had any problem with it is my sister, who still (I’ve been married sixteen years) calls me by my husband’s last name, and worse, when she addresses anything (even my birthday card), sends them to Mrs. Husband’s full name. I apparently don’t even get to keep my first name. Stupid Emily Post.

  44. HI
    This is Ashley MAcISaac writing you-first off-I sued canada`slargest newsgroup for stating I had saidracist comments- and if I see repeated here in any other forum I will have mylayweres approach your site owners-as yes I have used verbal irony inthe same way Jay leno and others have tomake a point thatracisim is notacceptableon anylevle-.Second off I am gay and I married a man- whom tookmy name-I offerd totake his buthe wanted totake mine- .Get your facts straight femnist.Andlastly-Jack White is a great guy who isnt crazy worth millllions of dollarsfrom very hard,and creative work- soemthing myfamilyknows howto do very well.If you were lucky enough tomarry either or us- you would say differnt things about us im certian.
    signed
    ashley macisaac-not only famous in canada

  45. Falyne, that’s the system my wife and I are using. She kept her name, I kept mine, and the last name of our first child (due in October) will be hers if it’s a girl and mine if it’s a boy. For our second child, the last name flips regardless of sex.

  46. I come from scandinavia, and in my country the girls get the dad’s first name and then daughter, and the boys get the dad’s first name and then son. so there are no family names, and no one changes their name when they marry, in fact i think its illegal. I dont like my last name, and i hate being called by it because essentially then you are calling me by my dad’s first name, not being helped by the fact that i dont have a great relationship with him. i dont live in my home country anymore, sooooo, if i got married, i would take the guy’s name, but only if it was a cool name, ideally i would like to change my last name to something of my choosing, but unfortunately that is illegal where i come from, so im stuck with it forever. in fact, im not even sure it its legal for me to take a foreign husbands name. its all cool that there is no requirement for the women to change their names, but its annoying when you really really dont want your last name anymore and theres nothing you can do about it.

  47. Another weird thing about Jack White: when he married Karen Elson, she took the last name White. I wonder if that’s ever happened before — the second wife taking the first wife’s last name.

  48. I kept my last name when I married, but that didn’t stop my mother from asking me “so what’s it like to be a Wilson?” I said “well I have no idea b/c as I’ve told you 100 times already I didn’t change my name!” My sister told tells people “Jen didn’t change her name b/c she’s lazy and didn’t want to go through the paperwork.” Sigh.

    My husband and I discussed adding each of our last names as a 2nd middle name. He also wanted to take my last name and kept saying so in front of his family which I asked him to please not do b/c it can only upset his mother. His father died years ago so no idea how he would’ve felt about me keeping my name, or his son wanting to change his last name. We finally decided to just keep it simple and no one change their names.

    But its almost irrelevant since everything is addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Wilson, even after we’ve told people I kept my name.

  49. i have a friend who took his wifes last name when they got married, his dad wasn’t anyone he wanted to be connected to anymore and he was the only one left to have that last name (mom remarried, sister married and took her husbands name) so it was a way to end the name, at least in their family.

    another friend kept her name and then they gave their kids her name because they wanted the last name to be carried on and she was the only one left with it.

    oh and one of my women’s studies profs in college, they both hyphenated when they got married. hers first then his, i think just because it sounded better that way.

  50. I’ve thought about this… I like my last name and would like to keep it. I don’t have a middle name. The problem is that my last name is 9 characters long, and my first is 7. The guy I’m dating (and we’re pretty serious) has a last name of 6 characters. That’s a long name lol. And I’m still not certain if I’d want to make my last name my middle name, or his last name my middle name. My last name is quite often an old-school males first name so it’d work well as a (long) middle name. His last name is a silly-sounding last name that I like a lot.

    I’ve also thought about making my mom’s maiden name my middle name ‘cuz it has an in interesting history that is recognizable the moment you say it.

    I HAVE NO IDEA MANG.

    I really do want to keep my last name in some form, though. Bah.

  51. My parents discussed changing my father’s last name when they married (although ultimately they wound up making the traditional choice and changing hers.) My grandfather claimed there was precedent in Scotland for households with lots of daughters to adopt the husband of the oldest daughter to “keep the name going on”, and as my mother was the oldest daughter…

  52. Another musician example:

    Nerissa Nield’s husband, another musician in her band (folk-rock band The Nields) took her name when they married.

  53. I’ve been trying to keep my own name, so that my Master’s degrees will be under my maiden name. But other things ended up with my married name on them. Now when I deposit my paycheck, I can’t ask for cash back. It’s so complicated. Wish I could use whatever name I wanted whenever I felt like it. But then, would the TERRISTS WIN?

  54. Does anyone stop to think about how little value a woman’s name has in our society? I mean, in my state, if a single mother gives birth and she lists the father on the birth certificate, the baby has to take the father’s last name. People get pissed when a married couple deviates from the norm. I’ve walked through cemetaries and found gravestones of couples where it was marked “John Smith” and “Mrs. John Smith (Jane Smith)”. Her real name was added as an afterthought. In my hometown, a married couple where the husband took his wife’s name made it on the front page of the newspaper.

    It’s things like this that makes me extremely reluctant to change my last name to my fiance’s. We both argued day and night about this and he just doesn’t seem to get it. He’s not doing anything to his name, but he’s fully expecting to change mine. We both hate hypenations and I suggested he change his middle name (which he refused). *sigh* sorry for ranting.

  55. The Sig Fig and I have talked a tiny bit about name-taking. I friggin’ love my last name and my brother and I are currently the last generation that has it, so I’d like it to live on if I have kids. Although I like her last name too, I don’t think either of us is crazy about the idea of hyphenation.

  56. my husband and i took my mother’s maiden name. i have been using her name unofficially since she divorced my dad and had always planned to make it official when i got married, when we were planning the wedding my partner told me that he had been thinking about it and he wanted the name too. i never would have asked it of him just as i know he never would have asked or expected me to change mine.

    most of our friends think it is quite fitting and my mom is really proud to have a son in law with her name (even though she plans to change hers when she remarries. ugh, baby steps i guess) and his mom and her family took it well, but as we expected his dad’s parents don’t even acknowledge the change. they made our wedding gift out to Mr & Mrs Theirlast and our Christmas card just came to Hisfirst & Myfirst. apparently to them if we don’t use their name we dont have last names at all!

    (on a side note, we haven’t made the legal change yet because we were waiting to get legally married until the California Name Change Equality Act became law. originally we thought that was to happen Jan 1 of this year but we have heard conflicting reports that it is not until Jan 1, 2009. any smart legal minds or experienced name changing couples know for sure?)

  57. Maybe this is terribly arrogant of me, but I think that the only sensible solution is the Spanish one.

    María Pérez Santos and José García Justo get married. Their names don’t change, ever. Their children are called Baby Pérez García, or Baby García Pérez. The only legal condition is that all children of the same couple must have the same last name. Consider it compulsory double barrelling.

    People are normally known by their first two names (María Perez, and Santos is dropped), unless the middle one is too common and the third one is very unusual. This is exactly what happens to our president.

  58. I don’t plan to get married, but really the simplest and most obvious solution to me is to just keep your own names!

    Well, it is very simple when it’s just the two of you, if you discount family that refuses to respect it, institutions that make you provide a marriage certificate to put your spouse on your insurance, students who call you sexist for it, things like that. But those are minor nuisances.

    When it stops being quite that simple is if children enter the equation, because then you have to decide whose name they get, and pretty much anything you do there becomes a statement. We did give our daughter my spouse’s name, and I say it’s because he’s the last of his name while I have three nieces and a nephew with mine, but I do wonder if I’d have stuck to my guns if the situation were reversed. because in the end, very few people really blink at a mother with different last name than her child, but a father with a different last name suddenly becomes a Question.

  59. My husband changed his last name to mine after we married, and changed his former last name to his first. Nothing was lost.

    This is my fourth marriage. I hyphenated my name the first time, but never again. I’ve taken a lot of flack, but I’ve always pointed out that men don’t have to change their names when they marry, why should I?

    Also, my daughter is the only next generation in my family. Good thing I stuck with my name. I think she will stick with hers, too.

  60. If I get married, I’ll probably keep my own last name, unless I really like my husband’s name. Mine isn’t anything special, really.

    I’d like for any kids I might have to take my last name, I think it’d be really cool if names were passed matrilinealy. I could tell my kids that its ALWAYS been done that way in my family so they would feel compelled to continue the “tradition.” lol

  61. Thanks to Nia for bringing up the Spanish system, which is a very elegant solution to this problem. I studied abroad in Ecuador and lived with la familia Galeas-Arguello. The wife was Arguello de Galeas (indicating marriage into the Galeas family), the kids were Galeas-Arguello, and the dad was Galeas-Andrade (keeping his mom’s name.) There was still some sexism in the system in that it was the mother’s name that was dropped by women after marriage; but I’ve been told that Ecuador has since introduced reversibility and now allows women to drop the father’s name.

    I tried to convince my wife to do something like this when we got married, but she had one of those central European names with only one vowel and she was sick of spelling it for people over the phone.

  62. I have never made racist statements -but the complete oppisitehave noted how rediculous racism is and have used verbal ironytodo so
    Please remove libelous statements that have been defended in Canadian courts inthepast
    thank you
    ps-I have already contacted the site monitor and hopefully this need go no further-

  63. Oh, the hyphen… my male partner’s parents kept their birth names but hyphenated the last names for the children. Both are unusual names — one Lithuanian, one Swedish. My last name is obscure (in the US) and German. Not to mention our first names; his parents made his up, and mine is very long and Welsh. It does make it easy to screen telemarketers, though.

    Our dog is registered at the vet with a twenty-three letter hyphen, just for kicks, but I’m not sure what we’ll do about human children. I rather like the idea of giving them names for various heroes of ours. “I’m here to register little Betsy Wollstonecraft and Johnny Kropotkin for soccer camp.”

  64. When it stops being quite that simple is if children enter the equation, because then you have to decide whose name they get…

    This is why I like the hybridized last name. There is no issue of children with different last names than either parent, or girls with one last name, boys with another, or whatever else that can complicate things. Creating a hybrid means both parents have the same last name, both parents retain part of their family heritage, and all children have the same last name as both parents. It also means avoiding hyphenation confusion, which can get irritating (some places will automatically assume that the first part of the hyphenated last name is a second middle name).

    For me, the decision to hybridize was pretty simple. I’m Persian and my last name is 11 letters long, already hyphenated (to indicate a gutteral stop), and always mispronounced. So basically, we just played with parts of our last names until we found a combination that sounded pretty. My name happens to be first in the combination, but that’s mostly chance and manipulation to avoid awkwardness (Persian last name + Scandanavian last name = hard to figure out). For us, it seems like the most egalitarian conclusion, and the most convenient one.

  65. The only way I’d take my hypothetical husband’s last name would be if it were Chains or Wonderland (Ali is short for Allison).
    Other than that I’m open to maybe taking his last name as a middle name or coming up with a new last name together… kids last names would have to be decided together if we ever decided to have children.

  66. My boyfriend and I have talked about changing our last names for marriage. Both are around ten letters long and would be awkward to hyphenate. Luckily for us, they’re both German, so a little hybridization wouldn’t be too hard.

  67. Is Ashley just googling his own name to find this shit?

    Suing a blog? Dude, get a life.

    And Jack White IS a crazy son of a gun, which has nothing to do with him being a creative genius (or perhaps everything?). Feel free to have his lawyers call me and everyone else in the free world on that one.

  68. I was engaged a few years ago to a non-feminist. I absolutly refused to take his name; not simply from a moral standing, but because I am extremely proud of my family history (Yes, I have my father’s surname). Hyphenating wasn’t an option as I have a long winded Scottish surname, and he had a complicated Norwegian one. He eventually offered to take my name. This just confused me.
    I didn’t understand how he could be willing to disregard part of his identity so easily. Why couldn’t I be who I am and he who he is? Why this urge to become one person? I had already agreed that our children could be given his surnme as i had been given my father’s. This used to be traditional in Scotland, you can see old gravestones have things like, “Jeanie MacArthur – Wife of Duncan Galbraith” on them.
    He refused.
    This wasn’t the reason we broke up, but it was a clue that is wasn’t going to work.

  69. My partner (spouse) took my name. And we’ve been pretty open about it, being the oldest and most widely read lefty American Indian blog still in existence. I think I wrote about it in a previous thread, a few weeks ago. And why we didn’t think, being from matri-matri tribes, that it was such a big deal. But, then, does anyone actually care what NDNs think regarding race or gender in this country?

  70. after avoiding it for a long time for reasons too many to name here, my bf and i are getting married in June. we are both hyphenating. i am adding his to mine, he is adding mine to his. we wanted to be fair. and, we did it alphabetically.

  71. My parents had friends once who each kept their own names after marriage, and then let their son make up his own surname at the age of ten or so (I’m not sure which surname they used prior to this). He named himself after a particular animal (presumably his favourite) and keeps the name still, in his late 20s.

    I grew up with a hyphenated name which I hated, so changed it to a variation on my father’s name several years ago. This gives me even less inclination to change it again if I get married, as I now have a name I like and chose for myself. My partner and I have idly discussed splitting surnames down gender lines for children, though I’m starting to think I like the idea of choosing a family name from either side that has significance, or perhaps using one of our middle names. With the option for the kids to choose whichever name they like once they’re old enough, of course.

  72. Just a reply to 3. VGC says: If you’re already trying to get such points and digs in, the relationship would seem to not be on the best foundation. .. And, yes, i could be talking out of my butt cause i know no one from nothing.

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