Double barrelling surnames?

[LilPatronum]

DP and I are to get married very soon.
I really do not want to change my surname. Neither does DP. I have a long history with mine including already having been changed once by deed-poll due to having my deadbeat Fathers name.

We have no children yet but planning to hopefully have some in the very near future. I really want the same surname as my children, especially having grown up with a different one to my Mum. DP wants the same surname too. We’re not too fussed about having the same name as each other and if we weren’t planning on children we wouldn’t bother with name changes at all.

Has anyone ever double barrelled their surname legally so say to Smith-Jones but then socially referred to themselves by their maiden name? So my name is Jane Smith and I will still refer to myself as that including on social media etc but legally I will be Mrs Jane Smith-Jones and so will DH. Then when we have children they will be called Smith-Jones and we will all be the Smith-Jones’ on paper. At school we will
introduce ourselves as Mr & Mrs Smith-Jones and for anything important related to that.

My Mum thinks this is stupid and we might as well not bother with the double barrelling if we are still going to refer to ourselves as our original names? AIBU to think this is the best compromise? Or has anyone else done it?

I’ve always wondered this too.
It wasn’t something I was at all fussed about. I didn’t want to change my surname when marrying, and I didn’t want the children to have two surnames, I wanted them to have their dads surname. I don’t feel any less connected to them. Dare I say, I quite like that I get my name to myself 🤣.

Just keep your own names. There's really no need to change.

Give the kids both by all means but I found it easier without a hyphen when dc wanted to shorten theirs.

Also 3, everyone has to decide what they're going to call their children anyway. There's no decision any parent can make that means their DC won't also have to make a choice, if they go on to have kids.

Is your username an Alan Sillitoe reference? 😀

No they don't, 50 years ago perhaps but I'm sure I read these days women who kept their own names etc..tend to be more highly educated/higher social class.

I think it’s just a bit selfish - making your kids choose which part of their name to drop so you and DH don’t need to.

And yes they’ve done it Spain for centuries, but with an established etiquette. I’m sure at some point there will be devastated parents posting on MN that their child has given up their part of the surname on marriage but kept the other parents and how sad that makes them.

Do as a friend and her husband did when they got married. They both abandoned their previous surnames and chose a completely different one they liked and they and their kids were Mr and Mrs Newname and Baby Newname and 2nd Baby Newname.

Ah just seen someone else said this too. Wonder if it's the same couple.

Nothing so interesting I'm afraid! I can't rememeber exactly why I thought of it, but I rememeber I was putting in lots of different usernames that were already taken and ended up with this!

They already have to choose, and we already know some GPs see their arses about this. There isn't a way to name your children that prevents them having to pick the name of any DC, and nor can any of us prevent the other GPs being upset- obviously we can all choose not to be a tit ourselves, but that's the end of our influence on the matter.

Also, established surname etiquette in the UK is being eroded all the time anyway. There are no safe assumptions any more, and this is the world a child being named in 2025 will grow up in.

I was thinking of this. Made a big impact on me when I read it as a kid. It was posters, not stickers!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3121132-the-death-of-william-posters

I had this. I set up my bank account back in the day when you didn’t need ID and just used the first part of my surname. Absolute arse to try and get it changed when I started having trouble because I didn’t have any ID that matched the account. Bank would only change it if I provided documentation that I had changed my name. Took months, in the end one of my mates mums who worked at the bank in the town I went to school in did it for me.

Why did you give them your husband's surname rather than your own though ? If it doesn't matter having the same name then surely your husband wouldn't care either way. If he does care then maybe it does matter ?

He wouldn’t have cared either way, I wanted them to have his surname. Plus the names we chose for them, went better with his surname. It didn’t matter to me, it didn’t matter to him, we are both equally the kids parents, and we went with his surname.

We did a version of this. Husband double barrelled. Mine was technically double barrelled because I became Mrs X-Y but I was never ever known as that. Child was just X because I couldn’t get used to the double barrel and didn’t want to inflict it on her (husband didn’t care either way). For family stuff we were all X (husband dropped the double barrel). When she got older and realised dad was X-Y from seeing it on work things etc, she wanted to be X-Y too - changed by deed poll in early teens so I started using X-Y too.

It worked for us and it gave us flexibility. I’m still not used to the full surname but am trying to remember to use it! Daughter is very much used to it and that’s all she’s ever referred to as now. We are all happy with how it worked out.

Maybe you'd have liked your name better if it had been your mother's rather than your deadbeat dad's ?

What I never understand is why when parents keep their own names, unless double barreling , the default/most common seems to be for the kids to have the father's name. Same for unmarried couples, yet if there is a separation later the kids are more likely to live primarily with the mother.

I wouldn't bother. I have my parents' names double barrelled, and my DC have one of mine + their dad's double barrelled. I feel like I have a name connection to both parents and so do my DC, so I think that is enough to avoid the feeling you had of being upset by having a different name to your mum.

I always think this. So many people I know, including my sister and many people I work with, have double barrelled their children's names, which is great - but what will they all do in future? At the very least the potential next generation after them will have three, possibly four surnames. It all seems very complicated. I kept my name when I married, children have DH's name (easier to spell and nicer than mine) - it doesn't bother me that I don't have the same name as them, but I can see if you do it's tricky.

They will make a choice. Like anyone does if they get married and if they have DC.

They will keep their name as is, drop one, maybe even decide on a completely new name or something else. I doubt 3-4 surnames would become a thing.

My children not having my name wasn't an option and DH felt the same way, one of us would have never agreed to the others last name so double barrelled it was.

Do you have to do anything legally?
Why not keep your own name legally.
Use double barrelled for their nursery, school etc.
If you're worried about how the children feel they won't know any different given you'll be referred to as Mrs X-Y by their teachers etc
For travel they're not looking at your passport but if they did they could clearly see where they have part of your name.

Maybe I'd believe that if kids ended up with just the mother's name 50% of the time. But funnily enough that's not the case. When it "doesn't matter" they mostly end up with dad's name (who "doesn't care" only if they have his name), and when it's about whose name goes better, again oddly enough dads always seem to have the "better name".

It's fine to give your kids whatever name you want to, but don't pretend these decisions are made in a vacuum. We are all shaped by our surroundings, like it or not, whether we go along with them or push back.

But they will have to choose at least one parent to potentially offend.

I’ve seen some batshit posts on here where parents are unduly upset by trivial things. I imagine there is a Venn diagram where “women who care about giving children their maiden name” and “women who will be unduly upset by decisions their children make” overlap, and within that overlap there will be some batshittery.

I just think insisting on doing something that involves your children, and that takes away their ability to do the same thing is a bit selfish.

You mean like if a woman keeps her name and the other family could get offended about it? Same thing and it's happened multiple times on mumsnet.

Sometimes people get offended at the choices you make. I think it's very bizarre to not do something which may never be relevant anyway such as not getting married or not marrying someone with a double barrelled name.

Why on earth is it selfish? DD is unmarried and the surname choice only cropped up as she owns rescue cats with her boyfriend!

They’d have had to choose a surname for the cat vet registration anyway, regardless of whether one of them had a double barrelled surname. All parents (and some pet owners) need to make a surname choice at some point.

You could equally say there could be devastated parents posting on MN having given up their surname use at the outset. In our family if I and my daughters hadn’t carried on the family name it would die out in our family, as there are no male cousins etc to carry it on!

For the pets they could have used DDs full surname, boyfriend’s surname or, what they did, which was to use one of her two surnames and his surname as well.

Everyone was happy and no big deal at all.

Absolutely this! The dad's name is far more likely to be the nicer one, easier to spell and goes better with the chosen first names. Seems statistically impossible to me, but there you go.