Childrens' surname - What did you do?

[Laurel543]

I have a 2 week old with my partner of 20 years and we are struggling to agree what surname to give the child.

We had planned to get married this year but I unexpectedly (and happily) became pregnant instead. When talking about the marriage, we said we wanted to share the same name and had very loosely agreed that we would both change our names (probably to a name we both liked from one of our family trees). I thought that this neatly sidestepped the problem of choosing one of our surnames and was very happy with the plan. We had talked a little about choosing a name before the baby is born and I have been researching potential names.

Since the birth of our child, my lovely partner, who has never shown any patriarchal tendencies, has decided that he’s not in fact prepared to change his name and is also insisting that the child has his surname. Ideally stand alone but he will consider double barrelling if absolutely necessary.

I am obviously surprised and disappointed!
He has a few reasons for his stand, the main one being that “this is what everyone does” (to be fair, all of our friends and family have given their DC the fathers name, married or not).
I feel pretty deflated about the whole thing. FtI am perfectly happy to change my own surname and feel strongly that I also want to share my child’s surname but I am equally unwilling to change my name to his.
Our names are both pretty clunky and do not double barrel well. There is also no easy way of amalgamating them.

We have reached stalemate

My children have my name too. And the world has moved on in the sense some of us do this.

But essentially I don't think society has moved on - most children will have their fathers name, and most women change their name on marriage. But things are changing slowly.

Hmm, in your situation I would give baby your name only . Then if you get married you can always add his to double barrel it.
(I have one dc with ex P, who has both our names double barrelled, with a hyphen. I wish I had given her mine only TBH and he will never allow a change.)

I have a baby on the way with DH now - I didn't change my name on marriage (I'd lose sharing a name with my DD and also for feminist reasons). Although I sometimes unofficially double barrel myself, legally I'm just Ms MyName.

We have debated baby surname a lot, the first names we have chosen go better with my surname and we definitely want baby to share a surname with my dd. So ideally baby would just have my surname as the double barrel sounds odd, and DH is actually okay with that. However I feel like FIL would be really hurt not to have their name included at all. Compromise we've reached is officially double barrel (no hyphen). Unofficially (eg school, etc) we will just use my surname for baby.

When we married we kept our own names. The DDs have my surname, with his surname as a second middle name.

We're not married and we gave our daughter My OH's surname. I massively regret it and he has agreed we will change it to what @JulesJules has done. She's still a baby so she won't know any different.