Grrr...

[Puffinity]

More of an AIBU but I don't want the AIBU treatment and I know I'll get a more sympathetic hearing here.

I am getting married next month. A while ago we were out and about with future FIL. He was quite insistent the proper form of address for me would be Mrs [partner's first name] [partner's last name], even though he knows I am keeping my own name despite it being a pain in the bum to spell as forrin because 'that's the tradition'. I just grit my teeth and ignored it but FFS, can everyone just collectively fuck off with the importance of tradition?! I said I will not be Mrs [someone else-who-isn't-even-the-same-sex's name], stop being so bloody disrespectful!!!

I changed my name and i wish I hadn't. I would love to be maiden name-married name. But dh at the time wasn't keen and i didn't really think it through.

Now that my boys are 4 and 2 I especially wish I'd done it. I took the surname of my stepdad when I was a child, so it's a name I chose and still love. I don't feel like I chose my married name really.

I would love to change it now, but my dh would get so upset. Which I know shouldn't be a consideration but it is

It does seem weird for either party to change their surname. But if neither changes their name, it still leaves an open question for any children. Personally I'm not keen on double-barrelled surnames. My wife didn't change her name, so we alternated surnames for our children which has been fine, but occasionally confusing at their school. And to my shame I once gave the wrong name for one of my children when I was filling out a form - hard to explain that mistake to an official.

That is the problem, many people are under the illusion that changing to a husband's name on marriage is a completely free choice. However it isn't, perhaps most women don't come under severe pressure as on that other thread, but look at how many threads there are with women complaining that the ILs, banks etc insist on adressing them as Mrs DHSurname. All because they wish to use the name they were born with, just like most men do. My DH has never been asked why he didn't change his name on marriage, doesn't get birthday cards addressed to him in my surname, doesn't have the rigmarole of "is that Miss or Mrs?" when he gives his name out. So changing name may be something that any individual is perfectly entitled to do but when vastly more women than men do so it perpetuates inequality.

x-posted with the last few posts, I agree that it would help if men felt more free to change their names. I can't make a man change his name so I have very limited power to enable that change to take place, apart from maybe challenging expectations by asking men I know who are marrying if they will be changing their surname. However I can make a stand against the expectation that women should change theirs by simply not doing so.

Can I just point out that once again on a thread that's about something that impacts on women, we are talking about the effect on men and on children?

Needforasitter- there is a perfectly good convention for children's names- to hyphenate them. You may not like it, but it is there and free for people to use.

I respect and agree with everything you are saying BertrandRussell. Do you think it's something that can be changed once you've already taken a partner's name? I don't want to live the rest of my life with regret that I don't have my name so I think I will have to. Is it wrong then that I also want my children to change names so that we all have the same? Won't I be making them feel the same as I have?

My feminist epiphany only happened as with a lot of women - after marriage/childbirth. I wonder how many women must regret changing their name.

My surname is much "better" than DH's. his is the kind that got a light mocking at school, mine is fairly well known but not Smith levels of frequent.

There was never any thought he would take mine!

How old are your children strawberry?

Hesterton, anyone can change name at any time, whether to disavow family or just because they were called Harry or Harriet potter before jk Rowling hit a typewriter...

But the social conventions mean that women have a defined time when they make that decision, so any such decision gets linked to marriage in a way that it needn't.

Both under 7

So your DH is John Smith and you are Mary Jones, children could become Fred Jones-Smith or have an extra middle name ie Fred Jones Smith.

Yes that's what I'd like and DH is happy to change names, but my 7yo is a little apprehensive about it. I worry that I'm then putting her under the same pressures that caused me to feel like I'd lost my identity when I took dhs name.

Would your 7 year old prefer the extra middle name approach then she could use if/when she got more comfortable?

I'm surprised women changing their surnames is as low as 70 per cent actually. I'd have guessed at more like 90 per cent. It's still very much the done thing in my circle - only person I can think of who didn't is a family friend but her and husband both changed their surnames to something completely new. She's now married to another man and has ditched that surname completely but has hyphenated her maiden name and her new husband's surname. The new husband also has the hyphenated name.

I know if I insisted on keeping my name there would be a lot of raised eyebrows. I think it's accepted to be known by your maiden name professionally but it's "expected" that socially you be known by your married name. I know if I didn't want to change my mum and my sister would think I was mad - they laugh at me for using the title Ms. I think many women change because they want to have the same surname as their children and again, it's expected that children will have their dads name.

I'm not married and don't intend on it any time soon but I don't have strong opinions either way on changing my surname. I don't really like my surname, it's part of me but if I had the chance to change it to something better then I might. I would definitely not want to be addressed as Mrs. [His Name] [Surname] or Mrs. [HisInitial] [Surname] though. Absolutely hate that and I cringe when I see it.

Women have been changing their surnames upon marriage for at least hundreds of years, and it's so ingrained in our culture that I think it's going to take a long time to change.

Golden

Sounds like your surname is "ok". If you met Mr DreadfulSurname and he wanted to take yours, what would you think?

when we got civil partnered no one asked about names but when we converted to a marriage loads of people asked. but when we asked what they thought we should change to (swap?), people tended to mumble and shut up. when presented with a really equal situation the conventions fail.

Also, as you say, Mrs "his initial" is rapidly dying out; no reason surname conventions can't also change fast

I have two names and two sets of id. I use my maiden name for anything work, financial and bill related. I use my married name for anything to do with my son. To be honest it does not feel like me, and I tend to use my maiden name the majority of the times.

I wish I had kept my birth surname, it was fabulous. Apart from nobody being able to spell or pronounce it, it has a great history and a strong place in the history of a particular region. However, I married a man who had strong feelings about it, but then he had strong feelings about a lot of things and strong fists and feet to match so it should have rung alarm bells for me. By the time I escaped him, I had two children with his surname and felt that as everything else was so utterly up in the air, they should have all the stability I could give them.

On my second marriage, I could have retained my previous married surname I suppose, but I had kept my abuser's name with gritted teeth for long enough. I could have reverted to my birth surname, but I chose to take DH's name. I have toyed with reverting to my birth surname, and I may well do so for my academics, but it would be a pain in the arse to do it all again now that I am of an age where I've collected the usual long list of official things in my name.

So laziness is part of it for me. And no, I am far from suggesting that all or any men who want their wives to change their surname are abusive twatwaffles, merely that for me, it was part of his abuse.

I didnt change my name when I got married and tbh I feel disappointed and more than a little bit cross when women I know do change their name when they get married. I don't have the same name as any of my children, who have their respective fathers' surnames (not DH's) so we have 4 different surnames in our house and it doesn't matter. The only time it has ever been an issue was when I was coming back from france with DH, SIL and BIL, (all have the same surname) and DD, and the immigration bloke asked what relation DD was to us and gave me a bit of a lecture about how I should have brought her birth certificate.

But the cat has my surname.

And if anyone asks why I didn't change my name I say I'll only have to change it back when I get divorced

I don't know any woman who didn't take her husband's surname, but my mother at least had the excuse that my father's name created a nice alliteration with her first name. And it was discussed as possibility that we'd use her name.

Funnily enough, a friend of mine who got married recently also acquired an alliterative name on this occasion. She always hated her last name, so I can understand that decision.

There is one woman, however, who had a really awesome name and changed it for a rather non-glamorous one upon marrying. She was only an acquaintance, though, so I didn't get to ask her why.

Am definitely planning on keeping my name IF I ever get married, which seems increasingly unlikely.
Unless it's a really, really awesome name.

As an ardent second wave feminist, name changing has given me my (I think) one and only feminist fail.

Through the 60s/70s I fought for all the stuff we now take for granted - being able to take out bank loans, mortgages, dumping male guarantees, getting various equalities etc. - all the really big stuff.

When I got married in the 60s I changed my name without a second thought .

Reading these endless threads about name changing keeps reminding me of my massive feminist fail. Luckily, I am now getting too old to give much of a shit, though I still feel I have let the sisterhood down…...

OP, I think you may be from the same country of origin as I am. I'm not married, so no issue with it. My last name's a lot easier to spell than my first, even though forrin.

Three things spring to mind:

1. I work in a fairly young organisation, and not in the central office so don't know everybody. Occasion arises when you suddenly get an email from 'suzy jones' and you think: 'oh, another new person in HR/admin/IT, why wasn't there an introduction email'. And after a bit you realise: 'oh, she got married and changed her name!'. Proud to say that a senior manager bloke changed his name upon marriage a year or so ago. He's 50, I think, not sure he's in a same sex or opposite sex marriage, just feel his name became a lot less distinctive, so a pity from that point of view.

2. I remember one of my first jobs in this country, some 14 years ago and one of the women (mid-twenties) in my department saying that of course she changed her name, as 'I wouldn't feel really married'. Eh, how 'bout your husband, doesn't he feel married either? So, definitely a status symbol, in my opinion.

3. Another woman in that same company, fretting about changing her passport to her married name and not having enough time as she'd be flying going on honeymoon. Well, logical me said : "Why didn't you book in your own name then", as the whole problem wouldn't have arising. Nope, couldn't possibly do that, as she was married then.

From the outside looking in, there seems to be a lot of status attached to changing the surname. As a sort of 'proof' that they managed to find a partner for life. Similar to a male colleague referring to his wife as 'the wife' instead of 'my wife' or just her surname as we all knew eachother's spouses' and kids' names. I told him (in my typical blunt style) that if he ever referred to her as 'the wife' again in my presence I'd be referring to him as 'the staff' (or words to that effect).