AIBU for wanting my wife-to-be to take my surname?

[confusedandsleepy]

Hi all, I know I'm new here, but me and my wife to be wanted a bit of outside help.

We are due to get married in October and a few days ago my partner told me she wasn't sure if she wanted to take my surname as she wasn't sure if it would sound right. Ever since I proposed I have thought of her with my surname, at first it sounded a bit odd (having known her with her surname and then suddenly the thought of a different surname will obviously sound a bit odd).

This hurt me quite a bit as I wanted her to have the same surname as me and our daughter (our daughter has my surname and it's not the name she has a problem with, it's just that she doesn't think it goes with her first name). But to me, part of getting married is ending up with the same surname.

AIBU for wanting my partner to take my surname when we get married this year?

All the people who are so intent on keeping "their" surname - you do realise that it is actually your father's name, and your grandfather's before him etc etc, so not YOURS at all

And yet men's surnames belong to them right? Otherwise surely it's not my father's surname, it's his father's, and his mother's, and so on back until the invention of surnames?

Or maybe that's just stupid, and everyone owns their own name, whoever they happened to inherit it from?!

YABU - harks back to the day when women were seen as the husband's property. Why is it so important to you? If having the same name is so important to you then how about you change your name? I kept my own name when I married and dcs are double barrelled - doesn't make us feel less of a family at all.

they should not be subject to vitriol from people who think they shouldn't

This is misunderstanding the issue. It's not to criticise individual women's choices, made in the system we're in, it's to criticise the woman-as-property tradition and the pressure that it still exerts on us.

All the people who are so intent on keeping "their" surname - you do realise that it is actually your father's name, and your grandfather's before him etc etc, so not YOURS at all.

We cannot help the fact that names have historically been attached to males, so all of our names will root back to a male in our lineage, in the same way that nobody whose subgroup of society has historically been oppressed can change that heritage. But most people don't feel attached to their original name because it came from them and then alone, they feel attached to it because it is the name they have grown up with and it is a part of their identity.

@eaglejulesk my surname is my mothers surname. Her surname is her mothers surname and her surname is her fathers surname.

YABU, change your surname instead.