Rafferty?

[RebeccaCloud9]

Please help - we cannot decide on a boy's name and I'm due any day now (don't know if it's going to be a boy or girl yet). Also can't decide on surname so I'm feeling a bit lost atm.

I heard Rafferty the other day and I'm after some opinions. I have seen previous threads about the name and opinions really changed in a couple of years - so I would be interested to see what you all think in 2014.

My other faves are Jacob (Jake), Joshua (Josh) and Samuel (Sam) but DP has vetoed them all boo! I really like names that are longer, with a good, obvious nn like these (so Rafferty would be maybe Raff) - other name suggestions would be good too!

Thanks so much!

I know of a few over the last few years. Possibly getting trendy.
My best friend's Rafferty has a brother, Josh, an sister Molly

Great name I think

maggie I don't understand your comments about the married thing. Why can't the op use her surname for the baby and keep her surname when she gets married? Not many of my friends have changed their name on getting married - I thought this was getting less and less common?

Rafferty is OK. Bennett not great IMO - lots of better surname type names if that's what you like.
Other obvious nn names include:

Christopher - Chris/Kit
Daniel - Dan
Richard - Richie
Andrew - Andy/Drew
Cameron - Cam
Edward - Eddie/Ted
Benjamin - Ben
Duncan - Dunc
Thomas - Tom
Timothy - Tim
Nicolas - Nick
Charles - Charlie
Stuart - Stu
Jonathan - Jon
Matthew - Matt
Frederick - Freddie
James - Jim/Jimmy
Angus - Gus

Re the surname I would Hyphenate if it works with the names. If you get married down the track you still have the option to change or not as you choose.

Jude Law has a son called Rafferty -I have heard a lot worse names and definitely think it's more than passable.

bringback - have you considered that she may want to take her partner's name? I consider myself feminist and modern and still really want to take my partner's name and for my kids to take his name so we can all be the 'surname' family.

do you plan to/want to be married one day? (to your partner, obvs). If so, you are better to go with his surname, so you don't have to end up changing the child(ren)s after you get married.
I knownyouve explained the whole 'want to take his surname' approach above, but I feel.really strongly that the default implication, as you said it here, is what causes people to feel as if giving the mother's surname is 'wrong'. It just perpetuates the stereotype. Exactly like saying pink is for girls, blue for boys. There is nothing wrong with this (well, there actually is IMO, but I don't want to get all theoretical), but we should work much harder not to perpetuate this quasi-traditional outlook as standard with ill-chosen phrases, otherwise it will never change.

I like it. But if your having surname ishoos, would either of your surnames work as a first name? Then he gets to keep both.

'we should work much harder not to perpetuate this quasi-traditional outlook as standard with ill-chosen phrases, otherwise it will never change.'

Amen sister.

I think Rafferty sounds too much like a surname. Love Jake, josh and Sam though - any chance of dp coming around to them?

maggie I understand (though I don't share) the desire for a family to have the same surname. But why shouldn't this be the wife's name, at least in about half of cases?

Maggie, I agree - I want us to one day all be the same name as a family unit. Like some people have said on other threads, my surname is still patriarchal, having been my dad's surname and his dad's before that. As an aside, my dad's family were a bloody nightmare and horrible to my mum and I have no particular desire to pass that on! Also, my mum has always kept her maiden name for work, meaning I see her maiden name (Bennett!) as the 'feminist' one on offer, rather than mine/the one coming from my dad's family.

So I wouldn't 'automatically' want DP's name as opposed to mine, but we would choose that one over mine for other reasons! I agree though, it's a shame that usually women tend to choose to have a separate name from the family and keep their own, or take their DP's and that it isn't more often a jointly made choice between 2 names.

Allsorted I'm still holding out for that, hopefully he'll come round!

Rebecca like you say, I think this should be an equal choice between two names and it usually isn't. You seldom hear of men saying they don't like their surnames for whatever historical reasons and want to give it up - they seem to feel it's just part of them. I think this is why I'm attached to my surname even though it's 'patriarchal' in the sense of having come from my dad. For me, the salient point is that this name has been part of my identity for the whole of my life so I wouldn't want to give it up. As a feminist I do also see it in terms of the history of oppression of women. If we lived in a racist society in which in the past black people had had to take the name of the white spouse in mixed race marriages because white people were the ones with property rights, fixed legal and social identities etc, we would rightly be horrified at the idea of people carrying this tradition on today.
Anyway, this is your thread and is not supposed to be primarily about this issue so apologies! Good luck with your name choices!

Rafferty is nice, maybe a little posh sounding but Rafe or Rafa are gorgeous nicknames.

I didn't change my name when I got married and kids have DH's name. has never been an issue for me or them and I've travelled abroad with them without DH.

one thing a friend did which I really wish i'd thought of was use her name as her kids' middle name. so they don't have a double barrelled surname but on all official documents her name still appears.

I actually want my husband's surname because mine is a bugger to spell and no one can pronounce it properly and I don't much care about losing it and taking his. It's not a feminist issue for me. I actually think feminism should be about expanding your options, not limiting them, and some of the posters on here are making me feel like I shouldn't want to take his name - is that not limiting my options then?

To be honest so long as we all had the same name, I wouldn't really mind if it was mine over his, but as I don't mind either way and I actually prefer his name to my own, I am quite happy to lose mine. I'm not really seeing the issue, it's certainly not a feminism thing for me.

On the abroad thing, I did get stopped going to the Netherlands recently and had to prove I was her mum via her birth cert, I was then asked if her father knew I was travelling. So the other poster may not have had a problem but I certainly wouldn't travel without being able to prove parentage.

For the same reasons, I really dislike the idea of DP asking my dad for his permission to propose - this, I feel, is even more harking back to women being possessions to own and pass on.

Bringback no worries, it's interesting!

i like Raff. Just Raff.

maggie I agree about the travelling thing - that's another reason why my dc have my surname.
As for your being happy to give up your name because people find it hard to spell etc, my point was that you don't often hear of men giving up their names because they don't like them, because people spell them wrong etc. I imagine your dh may have been more reluctant than you to give up his name (presuming you had that conversation) because socially that's much less accepted. Of course I may be totally wrong there and he may have been just as willing as you, but I would still assume that it is often the case that men don't consider giving up their names with the same seriousness as women. So how do we as feminists have the free choice/options you talk about if our options are restricted before we start ie all the family taking our name is unlikely to happen?