AIBU to get annoyed when asked my marital status when leaving a message?

[peanutbutterandbanana]

GGGRRRR - I used to get this in the last century... you make a call and the person answering needs you to leave a message, so you give your details and they say 'Miss or Mrs?'. My marital status is unnecessary and a man would certainly not be asked to confirm his personal home setup.

I've just called someone who runs an employment agency and I know her quite well. She's a one-woman-band so obviously uses one of these answering services, so I had to spend ages spelling my name out, detailing whether I was an individual or a company and then asked 'is it Miss or Mrs?', "Irrelevant," I said.

But my blood is now boiling. I cannot believe that we are well into the 21st Century and this question is still being asked when it is absolutely not relevant to this call or to my potential employment or to anyone else, in fact, apart from me and my OH/DP/DH. AIBU?

Right, so Miss and Mrs in this modern age have nothing to do with your marital status, they're just fairly arbitrary are they? And it's just a question of randomly deciding which one you like the sound of best?

I wonder why I forever get asked on the phone if I'm 'Mrs DP'ssurname' then.

I gather that in France now the term mademoiselle is pretty much dying out. All adult women are addressed at Madame and consequently the idea that the word denotes marriage is fading.

Of course it helps that monsieur and madame are used as generic forms of address.

I think that when addressing a person it is really important to use the name title etc which they prefer. I'm a teacher and over twenty years I've found that the teachers who don't get students' names right tend to be on a bit of a power trip and not very considerate of others in general. If one can't even bother to get a name right, it speaks volumes about how much they pay attention to and care about others.

So when someone tells you their name, listen carefully and remember. Getting it wrong implies that the listener is lacking intelligence, manners, or both.

maybe 100 years ago. these days your title is not the same as your marital status

That's quite a silly statement. Everyone I know who uses 'Mrs' started using it when they got married. If someone unmarried used Mrs I'd assume she was the cook or housekeeper in an Edwardian stately home.

Your friends are in an interesting minority, but on a societal scale it's a minority.

The way Miss and Mrs are used, they are a reliable indicator of the person's marital status. That's why MCs at weddings love to introduce the couple as 'Mr and Mrs X' (unless the bride has told them in advance that she will perform interesting surgery on them if they attempt this, ahem).

Rootypig How do these perceptions affect the job I get or the service I get from a doctor?

My year 2 teacher was ms. She I sister in it, she was married and didn't want to be miss, but had kept her own surname. That inspired me to be ms.I hate having to give away loads of things about myself whichever title I use. Ms is the least worstoption for me,but I hate the assumptions that go with it. I'm in the process of moving and regularly receive post to miss boy, when I have even ticked the 'ms' box, or wasn't asked. I know some people want to be miss, some want to be Mrs, but the way I see it the default should be the title that applies to all women (ms) unless you state otherwise.

TheOriginalSteamingNit - I love confusing cold callers if I haven't already put the phone down , to whom, when they ask "Is that Mrs Dh'sname?", I answer, "No, but it is his wife"

I once told a cold caller who wanted to know if I was Mrs MrInferior "no, she died last week" (because DP's mum had). And they didn't even blink...

I used to say "I'm afraid my husband's mother doesn't live with us, can I help?"

I don't really understand why the associations that go with Ms are a problem to be honest. If people assume I'm a spinster or a widow or a lesbian then I'm not sure it matters. None of those are bad things to be.

People make all sorts of other assumptions based on appearance, accent etc, I think it's just life that incorrect conclusions are drawn sometimes.

In any case social titles aren't like hereditary or honorary titles, there aren't really any rules for their use. Just as I could have retained Miss whereisshe (as I've kept my birth last name) or be Mrs whereisshe (as I'm married) or Ms whereisshe (which I am, as I don't see why my marital status is relevant), I could also be Mr whereisshe. The law says it's whatever name you are customarily known by and as I understand it that includes social title.

I have toyed with the idea of Mx as it's a gender neutral title but I feel I might be undermining a different gender equality struggle on the trans side of things.

Funny how it's always people without doctorates that think using err, your title if you have a doctorate is wanky

If you have a doctorate, your title IS Dr.

Just like when you get married, your title IS Mrs.

You can choose not to use your official title of course!

But calling yourself Dr. because that's your title is no more wanky than calling yourself by a title that tells everyone you are married.

Both are - as this very thread discusses - generally irrelevant in everyday life, but using them is a general convention. I have to say, using a new title which denotes a professional status is at least a. equal between sexes and b. may be significant in some situations. I can't think of any situation where people needing to know that I am a married female would ever actually be relevant unless I was attempting bigamy

• 'Hang on? Mrs., you say? Mrs.? Darling! You are so busted, I can't marry you!!'

• 'Shitballs!! Foiled again... If only I'd gone and got myself a doctorate, or a clip-on penis!'

Gender neutral titles... I quite like Hs. - Homo sapiens?

Signed, Hs. Castlemilk.

V

Oops. What I meant to say was, Castlemilk, that makes precisely no sense. If I'm a doctor, I'm Dr Joss. But if I were to be a Mrs I would have to change my surname as well. Which is entirely different.

YANBU, but you have more balls than me!

The most I have done is when I was talking to a chugger in town, he asked me my name etc, and Miss or Mrs. I said Ms. He said, 'ooh, that's odd. Why Ms?'.

I told him my marital status was none of his business! I tell people at work this all the time as well, because apparently Ms makes me seem divorced .

Castle actually that's not correct. When I got married, my title wasn't Mrs, as I chose not to use it. Social title is a choice.

Once, when asked if I was Miss or Mrs I confused the poor boy in the bank by asking him why my sexual availability needed to be advertised. Since, as a Mrs that would presume that I was no longer sexually available to men. He looked very, very confused until I pointed out he would not ask a man if he was married, presumably because married men are not a threat to the banking system.

To be fair, I may have been very jet lagged and extremely pissed off by that point. I may not have been completely coherent by that point.

MrsJossNaylor you wouldn't have to change your surname if you used 'Mrs'. It's social convention not law, you don't have to call yourself anything. (Obviously you need to be called something but you know what I mean!)

YABU. I'm quite sure they really don't care if you are married or not they just need to allocate a title to you instead of telling someone 'Brown' called. If you hate it so much just say your first name or say Ms.

droflove, the OP couldn't just say her first name as they asked for her title. And they didn't say 'what's your title?', they said 'Is it Mrs or Miss?'.

And they did get her first name. They then wanted a title on top of that.

I do love it when people have not only not read the full thread, they've not actually read the OP.

If that is indeed the only option, I'd a) complain, and then b) say "Mrs" with my surname, since I am married, it's just not dh's name - just to confound them.

I'd make sure to tell them that they were therefore still referring to me incorrectly and that the courteous thing to do would be to refer to me as I had requested initially, by my first name.

In practice, they are always happy to do so as they are frightened by my Germanic surname and glad of the excuse not to have to try and say it

Yes, JassyRadlett, isn't it tiresome! Especially when OP is at the top of each page of this thread!

droflove - I gave my first name (spelt it out), then my second name (spelt it out) and that really was all they needed - it was just a "please tell them that I have called". The woman taking the message then wanted completely IRRELEVANT information (my marital status title). If I had wanted to let the person know that "Mrs First Name, Second Name has called" then I would have said that to start with.

As it was the silly person didn't even ask for my phone number - more important, I would think, than my marital status when it was a telephone call I was making and a telephone call back that I was requesting.

A MAN would not have had to go through that rigmarole. They would have just left their first name and then their second name. End of.

Lots of married women use Ms for all the good reasons given above. I use Ms.

Interestingly I have just a few minutes ago informed the representative of the insurance company which I was calling, that in their paperwork they have me down as Miss when in fact I am Ms. I actually don't think titles are necessary, I don't like them and I certainly don't think they should be connected to one's domestic arrangements in any way. As it happens, and as I sometimes argue when speaking to people who don't feel so strongly as I do, when I got divorced I changed my last name to an entirely new one. So I am not Mrs, but I'm not Miss since I have actually been married and I did not revert to my birth name, so Ms is the only title which will fit. But let's get rid of them all, I say. The Quakers don't like titles and I'm with them on this issue (and many others, come to that).
But there are still people (I know a few of them) who don't like being addressed by their first name, for example by their carers. I guess they still need a title.
Does anyone else also dislike intensely the way in which some people still insist on calling married women Mrs Joe Bloggs (their husband being Joe Bloggs) instead of using their own names?
I did have a funny experience with my mother many years ago when I first got uppity about that last issue and started addressing my parents (in the days when we still wrote letters and had to address the envelopes) as (equivalent) Mr J Smith and Mrs D Smith. My mother told me off, saying that the postman might think they were a divorced couple living together. So now you know!