I have a 2 week old with my partner of 20 years and we are struggling to agree what surname to give the child.
We had planned to get married this year but I unexpectedly (and happily) became pregnant instead. When talking about the marriage, we said we wanted to share the same name and had very loosely agreed that we would both change our names (probably to a name we both liked from one of our family trees). I thought that this neatly sidestepped the problem of choosing one of our surnames and was very happy with the plan. We had talked a little about choosing a name before the baby is born and I have been researching potential names.
Since the birth of our child, my lovely partner, who has never shown any patriarchal tendencies, has decided that he’s not in fact prepared to change his name and is also insisting that the child has his surname. Ideally stand alone but he will consider double barrelling if absolutely necessary.
I am obviously surprised and disappointed!
He has a few reasons for his stand, the main one being that “this is what everyone does” (to be fair, all of our friends and family have given their DC the fathers name, married or not).
I feel pretty deflated about the whole thing. FtI am perfectly happy to change my own surname and feel strongly that I also want to share my child’s surname but I am equally unwilling to change my name to his.
Our names are both pretty clunky and do not double barrel well. There is also no easy way of amalgamating them.
We have reached stalemate