ExDH is furious I’m keeping his name… AIBU?

[NCsurname]

Divorce recently finalised after being separated from exDH for some time. I received a message this morning from exDH who noticed that my married name is still present on my LinkedIn profile. I politely responded to let him know that I wont be changing my surname back to my maiden name and left it at that.

Received a barrage of abuse in response so I’m wondering, AIBU?

For context,

1. we don’t have children, but I’m now known well professionally under my married name.
2. the name isn’t particularly unique or uncommon, so I don’t feel it specifically links to him in any way. Also, I’ve moved away since the split so it’s not as if he’s having to see me around and be reminded of it.
3. I found the process of changing my name after marriage to be a massive hassle and given the stress involved in the divorce itself, I’d rather not bother with the admin of name changing again.
4. I’ve grown to like the name and it just feels like “me”. I never liked my maiden name and feel as though a nice surname is the only good thing I got from the marriage!

AIBU? I should point out that I’m now in a new relationship, my new partner is well aware of all of this and sees no issue.

They have done no such thing. Utter rubbish. They have followed an old fashioned convention at worst.
I agree with a PP... your arguments are not feminism, more woman-bashing.

a name is such a personal thing, agreed. so why would you just adopt someone else's?

Not all relationships with the family names are easy.
Some are horrific.
They like the tradition.👰
They see it as a new start and see the name change as a signal of that.
It has financial benefits.
Some women like having 2 sets of documents.

I'm not sure why you'd want his name. It's his name not yours you only took it by marriage.

Change it by deed poll its very easy
I'd be embarrassed to have an exes name tbh.

OP has listed multiple reasons why

Individual women don't have to declare that they see themselves as subordinate to their husbands. If they have taken his name and become "Mrs Joe Bloggs", then they have publicly and unequivocally declared it by doing that.

😂😂What a load of codswallop.

The name on my birth certificate will be the name on my death certificate. My family name is my birthright. It's not my 'maiden' 🤮 name, nor is it my father's name. It's mine.

Hacks me off no end that it's taken for granted a male's name is automatically his by right but that a female's is on loan to her from a man.

Yanbu

What a completely weird thing for him to get upset about. He won't see you, hear from you or about you, you'll live in a different town and have no contact. How can it possibly affect him?

This is such bunkum!!

I have been known by Mrs married name for so long (30+ years) professionally and personally from such a young age that it is my identity

It's nothing to do with my ex husband now. So some stupid MNers think that we can't as free independent women to decide on our longest used name?

Ffs it's feminism gone wrong if people are saying what this silly poster said. Of course I'm not embarrassed at all to use my actual name , it's never been about my DH at the time nor my now exH, it's my longest used name and my identity.

All my professional qualifications are in my name as it is now. I am not changing it because some MENZ think I should!!! Nor any silly MNers thinks I ought in their limited misogynist world !! You be you and I will be ME!!

@NCsurname
your exDH has NO say in what name You choose to use

It's NOHB

He can go swivel

You stick with the name you want that is (& feels most like) your identity and what is easiest and most comfortable for you

Your ex has absolutely no say over it, nor do any new partners

It's a basic error to think that feminism is about 'choice'. It's not. It's about challenging and dismantling patriarchal systems. It is a specific political ideology.

Absolutely. Dismantling those inequalities will perhaps inevitably result in more choices being on the table for women. If you have options and information available, but still choose those according with the structures and social pressures of a system structured entirely for the benefit of men at the expense of your own (cf. 'wifework), then this very clearly has little to do with feminism.

Choice might well be an inevitable outcome of feminism, but that's incidental. It isn't and never was the objective or intended endgame of feminism itself.

That assumes there is only one "brand" of feminism and no-one can be feminist unless they subscribe to it with absolutely no deviations. It's a remarkably absolutist and indeed intolerant way of thinking which is the antithesis of real feminism.

OP doesn't have her ex's name. She has her own name which she chooses to keep.

I agree that taking a man's name is a non-feminist act.

I really struggled with this upon marriage. I knew that as a feminist I should retain my own name and didn't change it for a couple of years. I had a surname I didn't particularly like, from a father who was not around and who had paid no child support.

My ex manipulated a situation whereby it would have cost quite a bit of money if I didn't change my name so I went ahead and did it.

I then had years of career progression in my new name, a child, to whom I gave my married name, and then a divorce.

I've kept this name, which has become my name, for professional reasons and to have the same name as my child which I do appreciate.

My compromise with my feminist principles is that I intend to take a new name and change by deed poll when DD is 18.

I had considered changing it to my mother's family name but I have a male cousin who has started addressing me with that name - he also tried to get my mother to revert back to that name. I think he believes himself to be head of the family and custodian of the name. I was very angry when he sent me a letter addressing me with this name as it's a name I have never borne. So it does feel that my mother's name is also part of this patriarchal tradition to which I do not wish to conform.

So whilst I think it's a non feminist act to assume a man's name, keeping it is sometimes just the pragmatic thing to do.

Names appear hugely important to men; you see this particularly in their insistence that children take their names. I know several women who retained their names on marriage but the children have the fathers' names. There was a thread not too long ago where a man was trying to convince his pregnant partner to have an abortion and said if she went ahead with the pregnancy he wanted nothing to do with the child- but was insisting it should have his name.

Exactly.
It is her name to do with as she likes.
I have been divorced a very long time and still have the name I took when I married.
If I was marrying now I wouldn't ch%ange my name to my OHs. but I married when I was young, struggling with very poor esteem and CPSTD from childhood.
Why divorced people choose to keep their married name is personal to them, and can't be written off as a "non feminist act".
FWIW my reasons for keeping the name are-

1. It is a ball ache to change. I also have a business, lots of bank accounts, credit cards, would have to go through verification processes ( anyone who sells on Amazon know what that is like).
2. I quite like the name.
3. My married name is also my mother's maiden name. And that name goes back to my great grandparent who was a single parent, never married, a very tough thing to do in the 1880s. She was a pround woman and although she lived in a small rural town with wagging tongues and church clergy reminding her that she was a fallen woman she survived. She was a skilled seamstress and people would travel far to have garments made and repaired. She was able to afford a modest but comfortable house, feed and clothe herself and child and made it a priority to educate her child. She held her head high in public and refused to be criticed. I am sure it stung, but she persevered.

I am proud to have her name, which carried down to my mother and slipped back into my life. So although my name was changed when I married, I also like to think it reverted back through the female line to when my great grandmother was born in the 1850s.

Does it? I don't think it does. The many schools of feminism emerging throughout the 20th century have been some of the most bitterly fraught and contested areas of discussion I've witnessed in the political sphere. Of course all women don't think alike, and the objectives of the different feminist schools are as vastly different as people are individual.

What they do have in common is the striving for equality of opportunity and equality of treatment. Those opportunities don't have to look the same. A case in point are the two schools of first-wave feminism. Take the 'wages for housework' campaign vs. 'the woman citizen'. One claimed women should receive recognition from the state for their domestic labour and be paid and have an independent income from it, the other fought for equal rights and opportunities in the workplace. It was their contemporary version of SAHM vs. WOHM, or rather, woman, as many women of the era saw life a straight-up choice between a career and a family. In the interwar years, women in the professions who married faced a legal marriage bar and were forced to give up their jobs. Thanks to their efforts, our choices nowadays are not as stark. Some women opt for either/or, many do both.

My point is that choice merely comes as a result of those efforts. Woman citizen, radical feminism, third wave, fourth wave, were all about achieving equal respect, opportunity and rights as citizens, not 'choice': what women later choose to do with the outcome is the consequence of those battles and up to them. But if you end up with a f/t career AND doing all the housework - as many threads on this site are testimony to - it's hardly a feminist outcome, is it? Because who benefits? Certainly not the woman.

Agree it’s an unusual thing to do and you will probably get questions from friends & family- but who cares?
I disagree that it is an unusual thing to do.
I've been thinking about my colleagues, family and friends who are divorced and I only know of one that has changed her name back.
Everyone else has the same name.

@speakout although you may not be referring to my post I would like to clarify that I think the taking of a man's name is the non-feminist act, not the keeping of it.

In fact in these circumstances the keeping of the name in the face of opposition feels more like a subversive act!

I love your story about your great grandmother and the serendipity of her name coming back into your life.

Were those women who beat the other woman to death for wearing the wrong garments making a feminist choice, someone asked yesterday. Obviously we are expected to answer no. Equally obviously no is the right response, but it is pretty plainly a false equivalence with deciding to change, or not, one's surname. Those women were exercising their choice, given to them in a supremely patriarchal society, in order to deny another woman her choice, and incidentally, her life. That simply cannot be a feminist choice however you slice it. I know some feminists are a bit extreme, but I doubt there are many who would stand up for other women's rights to be murderers and bullies. So we'll take that argument off the table, shall we?

Thankyou- and yes also for explaining the distinction.
Yes it does feel like a little act of rebellion.
Five generations now carry my great grandmother's name.

You're not the gatekeeper of a what a feminist act is or isn't.

I, too.

My attitude to this discussion is that it irks me no end that women's names are assumed to be on loan to us from a man. Ie my name's mine, not my father's. I didn't take my husband's name on marriage, albeit I know this might have been a harder convention to resist in former generations as even I have received unexpected rudeness and pushback. My mother, for one, with hindsight wouldn't have changed hers.

It's amazing how many misconceptions exist respecting this: 'but your husband's name is your "legal" name' is a phrase I've heard depressingly often. Not so. Your name is your name unless you actively change it.

But I'm pissed on account of women who do exercise the choice to take their husbands' names (and no one needs to justify why), also being assumed to have these names as some form of loan which must be handed back in the event of the dissolving of the marriage.

Bloody awful, parochial, and yes, anti-'feminist' attitude. No matter where you are seen or assumed to have got it from, your name is yours!

Obviously murder and changing your name are not 'the same'.

Equally obviously, the point that choices made by women that support patriarchy and shore up patriarchal power structures are not feminist choices, just because they're made by women, is a valid point.

Words do mean things, though.

It would be a strange thing to claim that someone giving bankers huge bonuses, cutting benefits, and taking away free school meals was performing socialist acts. Because socialism is an actual political ideology with specific aims and beliefs.

It would be strange to claim that going fox hunting, killing animals for their fur, and testing cosmetics on rabbits are acts of animal welfare.

It would be strange to claim that beating up Orthodox Jews or Black or Asian people while shouting racist abuse at them was an anti-racist act.

I'm not the 'gatekeeper' of any of those either. But words don't just mean anything you want them to mean.

My Mother kept my dads name until she married her new husband. I did think it weird personally and if It was me, I'd rather cut all ties and have a fresh start.
But, I can see why women do it.

👆🏼 This.

@SoupDragon , choices aren’t made in a vacuum. I don’t think women are lying. I think a lot of People are unaware of subtle and pervasive patriarchal influences.