Hi everyone, I'm hoping you can have a read through this and see if I'm being sensible or ridiculous with this suggestion!
So I did not change my name when I married my husband - for two reasons. The first is that I am a doctor and I also have a PhD, so I have 20+ years of education plus a career built on my name. The second is that my partner is British and my family is Indian. Although I have a large extended family, I am the last person in my family with my surname.
I'm newly pregnant and we're talking about names now and a surname dilemma has come up. I would like to give our children both our surnames (mine first, his last, no hyphen) because I want to pass something of my family history and my culture onto my children. Both our surnames are only 4 letters long, so even if they were to use their full name it would only be 8 letters in total. They also sound really nice together.
I did consider putting my surname as a middle name, and this is my second option, but there's something so appealing to me about both of our surnames having equal standing. Of course I expect and have no problem that casually our kids might only use one surname (my husband's, since his would come second), but I would at least like to give them the option to use both if they wanted to further down the line.
I don't think my husband has fully made his mind up on what he wants to do but now I keep second guessing myself! In the context of the wider world, am I being too unreasonable in wanting to do this?