What surname for the baby?

[JamesJames]

Most of the discussion on here seems to be about first names / middle names, but my real question is around surnames.

When my wife and I married, we each kept our own surnames. This was exactly as we wanted and expected -- we both find the long survival of the custom of a wife taking her husband's surname rather odd.

However, now that we're expecting a baby we face a problem of what surname to give him. We don't like newly-minted double-barrelled surnames (and our surnames would be very clunky if put together anyway), so what to do?

In terms of our own parents' views, my father has a strong expectation that the baby will have my/his surname (he is always wittering on about "continuing the line" as if we were aristocracy or something), and I think he'd be very upset if it didn't. I don't think my wife's family have any particular expectations, however.

In terms of my wife and me, we both want the baby to have our own respective surnames, but I think it is more out of a general desire to stake our claims rather than trenchantly-held views for either of us!

How do we solve this?

Once a name belongs to a person, it doesn’t matter where it came from, it belongs to that person. A woman’s name is not her father’s name, it is her name.

@SayNoToCarrots
My point is that by giving your child your surname rather than their father’s you are simply giving the child a name passed to you by your father rather than their own, presuming (fairly safely) that you were given your father’s surname. It doesn’t make any sense. Just one man’s surname instead of another’s. And I say man’s surname because they are, to the extent of my knowledge, always direct or indirect patronyms.
I didn’t say anything about women taking their husbands surname, so no, it doesn’t offend me. I’m not offended by stupidity either, though it does quite often upset me.

Keeping your own name which was your father’s name? Or your mother’s name which was her father’s name?

Ah yes this old reliable comment. A perennial fave from a particular type of witless woman.

Remember, ladies, you do not have a name. It is merely on loan to you from your maternal grandfather, your father, or your husband.

Now get back in the kitchen and stir the broth.

Lol you’ve definitely not understood my argument, which is simply that if a mother gives her child her surname, fine and good, nobody cares, but the mother got that surname from however many generations of men giving their surname to their children, so the net result vis a vis dismantling patriarchal/patrilineal naming systems is, while not quite zero, pretty fucking close to zero.
So the child’s surname is Johnson instead of Jameson. Whoop di doo!

We can’t change history, but we do control the here and now. That a woman own’s her name regardless of it’s derivation is all that matters.

going forward, we can stop expecting people to erase a part of their identity by changing names at any point in life. We can make our own rules for naming our children. We can do better.

Hear hear. 👏

Is there any reason to be rude to @OverTheHillAndDownTotherSide?

Her child, like mine and millions of others are automatically named "baby [mother's last name]" when born.

Oh I just remembered I know a couple who are married and have th

[Posted too soon]

Oh I just remembered I know a couple who are married, and had the same last names before marriage. They aren't of Indian origin and aren't related to one another.

I wasn’t being rude, but bringing up what’s written on the baby’s bracelet by a medical practitioner moments after birth as if it were relevant to the legal name given when the birth is registered days or weeks later, is either obfuscatory or stupid or both. There is no correlation. The bracelet will always reference the mother, for obvious reasons, whereas at the registration of birth you can enter pretty much whatever name you like.

I was replying to a post which said:

all that happens is the hospital asks what the surname is and it gets entered there. It’s not automatic to get the mothers maiden name at all.

I was pointing out that I wasn’t asked, that I don’t have a maiden name (hideous term) and that DD was given my name by the hospital automatically (as she should).

You took that in a completely different direction. 🤷🏻‍♀️