Exceptions can always be the case and hopefully we can agree that men are generally older than the woman they are marrying. Moreover societal pressure has historically and still currently layed upon the man to provide. Hence the established male entering marriage is a diffuclut sell to ask him to change his name.

Isn’t it true that all we are in life is our reputation? My reasons for an established male NOT to change his name are practical and realistic. Most established women I know that enter marriage later in their lives keep their maiden names as well. Example: Dr. Rogers at work, Mrs. Monaghan at home. The children to have the fathers name as does the mother while at home!

You cannot force society to demand acceptance of something that simply does not make sense for many men. A masculine default has always been accepted. The reverse has not. A woman can wear mens clothes and nobody raises an eyebrow. If a man wears womans clothes he is automatically assumed to be gay or some variation of it.

Practicality and reputation trumps the mistaken and misguided accusation that men simply won’t bend or submit. When and if it makes sense we will!!!

I don’t live in a vacuum, either, and my family of anti-feminist traditional reactionary conservative matriarchs would be appalled. So what? I don’t care. (BTW, that’s my mom’s side, my dad’s side would be fine with whatever.) Even though I’ll take endless grief for my decisions, it’s more than worth it for me. I don’t share their values, I hope my children don’t either, and I’m more than willing to pay the price. When they go at my daughters the way they’ve always gone at my sisters and me to let us know we’re less than because we’re girls, I’ll continue to fight every battle and feel extra good about it knowing they’re pissed about the name thing.

What nonsense. It focusses the idea of kinship/family/whatever. If you like the family name you were given at birth, you’ll keep it. If you don’t like it, you’ll change it. Unlike the present chaotic system where it’s still often just assumed that a woman will adopt her husband’s family name however she feels about her own (and that a man will not change his family name regardless of what he feels about it) under the new default system, adults will have the family name they want to have.

I have no idea where I heard this.

A friend of mine told me the following story which as far as I know it is true:

She was getting divorced from her husband and did NOT want to keep his last name. Also, hated her maiden name intensely so didn’t want to take that back. Didn’t want her mother’s maiden name either because it was impossible to spell. Wasn’t sure what she wanted, just wanted ExHusbandsName -gone-, so she asked her lawyer for suggestions.

Lawyer was a little bemused, but wanted to be helpful, and inspired by a movie advertisement in the room, suggested the normal-sounding, easy to spell surname of the celebrity on the ad.

So the surname my friend has used for decades now is “Selleck” and she does get some funny looks when referring to her ex-husband whose given name, coincidentally, is Tom.

:-)

QUOTE
>apm
Emily, How would you determine which of your 2 surnames to use? Is there a convention or is it a random choice?

> elgie
Each child is named after the first family name of each parent. In my case, I got Ortega from my father and Garcia from my mother. The moment I have children from my current partner, they’d be named Rodriguez Ortega by default. Although, depending on some countries, the parents can switch the surnames’ order so that the woman’s one comes first. We could then name our kids Ortega Rodriguez. Also, anyone can switch his or her own family names’ order at any time of his/her life, provided he o she’s older than 18. So I could decide to switch my own family names at no cost and call myself Garcia Ortega; this would obviously mean that Garcia would become the family name to be inherited by my future children. Sounds a little complicated at first, but hey, we keep our identities all life long!
UNQUOTE

Yup, pretty much what elgie said. In some countries you pass down the father’s first surname; in other countries you pass down the mother’s first surname. I’ve never even considered it complicated, because well, I grew up with that and it has made sense to me all my life.

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QUOTE
> Isabel
Me too! I was born in Puerto Rico and when we moved to the states for a couple years I was going by my dad’s name, but it sounded weird to me and I lived with my mom (I’d drop the dad’s last name entirley, since we haven’t spoken in like 6 years, but then I would have a named uncomfortably similar to a singer’s. Think Christine Aguilera). Also, I have grown kind of fond of my unwieldy, ethnically-nonsensical (despite being Puerto Rican, my last name somehow wound up Basque-English) name.
UNQUOTE

Yay, another Puerto Rican! I was born there also and moved to the States when I was 22 to go to grad school. I like both my surnames, but I find it annoying when people address me by my second surname, because that’s a completely different person. In my middle school there was a girl one year ahead of me who was named “Emily SecondSurname”, where “SecondSurname” is in fact, my second surname. She wasn’t related to me or anything, but her first surname was my second surname, and her second surname was something else (I forget what). One of the nuns (Catholic school *shudder*), who taught religion class for the 7th-9th grades, and who wasn’t Puerto Rican, would always confuse our names and give me her grades! I was a straight-A student, and she was a C-student. Needless to say, that annoyed me a lot. When someone calls me “Emily SecondSurname”, I don’t really get that they’re talking/writing to ME until a few moments later, because well, that’s not my name (and it’s also the name of this girl from middle school who almost ruined my grades through no fault of her own). I don’t feel all that weird when someone calls me “Emily FirstSurname”, because that’s how you shorten names in PR. But I always prefer to be addressed with both surnames, as that is my complete name.

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QUOTE
> plunky
The Latin American system seems most equitable, and has improved my opinion of hyphenated last names, which seems to be the nearest US equivalent.
UNQUOTE

That’s how I see hyphenated names also. Like I said, I have a hyphenated name only because I was getting problems from all over with people assuming my first surname was a middle name, so I inserted a hyphen. But some people still get confused *sigh*

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QUOTE
> Hurrycane
I took my husband’s last name when I married him. I’m sorry that offends some of you so much. Oh wait — no, I’m not. It was my choice and I wanted to do it, for reasons that were almost entirely aesthetic. Don’t you dare accuse me of propping up patriarchy by doing something I wanted to do. The opinions of strangers didn’t factor into my decision, and they still don’t.

> C. Diane
This reminds me of a conversation I had with a pharmacy student I was on rotation with. He was engaged, and he said he wouldn’t marry a girl if she wouldn’t take his last name. I said that I wouldn’t marry anyone who would force me to change my name.
UNQUOTE

These two posts remind me of a thread about married names that I followed on a forum recently. Some people were for changing last names; some were for not changing last names, some were indifferent to the whole thing, etc. But there was a guy there claiming that he would not marry a woman who refused to take his last name. That made my eyebrow twitch. He also claimed that keeping one name for the entire family makes it easy to track down ancestors. I mentioned in a reply that I’ve traced my family history, both sides of it, all the way back to my great-great grandparents (earlier than that I couldn’t find any records), through the magic of each person in a marriage keeping both their surnames intact. Of course, this is how I was raised and how my culture does these things. Sometimes it gets to be a problem when cultures come together and clash on the issue…

I’m going to quote here a post that I made on that forum, as a reply to that same guy when he got belligerent and claimed his point of view was the only valid one. What I wrote there pretty much sums up my position on the whole thing:

In my case, I enjoy my surnames. They are mine, my surnames, part of my identity as a human being. They represent my parents (both of them), my culture, my heritage, and I am proud of that. I’m also already known in my particular field of work as “Emily Surname1-Surname2″, and I want to keep it that way so that my body of work doesn’t get lost in surname changes. And I want my kids to have part of their heritage reflected in their name.

I don’t judge anyone who decides to change surnames upon marriage, or to not change surnames, or to hyphenate with the spouse’s surname, or to melt both surnames into a new one, or whatever other option. To each their own, of course, and tastes vary. But for me, personally, the choice is to keep my name intact. And since this discussion is on that topic, well, I am presenting arguments here for my position, and other people post arguments on their positions as well. There’s no right or wrong, just personal preferences and opinions, differences in cultures and traditions, and a plethora of other things that affect someone’s position on this subject matter.

Now, as I am contemplating getting rid of the husband, I am in a quandry about the name thing. I don’t want to keep his, but I absolutely do not want to take back my original. Ideally, I think I might like to have my mom’s maiden name.

Personally, I would like to see the general standard work its way toward women keeping their names and female children getting that name and male children getting the dad’s name. But that’s just me.