Surname change after marriage

[CalmDownPacino]

This probably seems trivial but is really bothering me and I don't have the right responses to people! Getting married in a few weeks, am not changing my name. Some people have asked if I'm changing my name and I've said no. The responses I get are mainly "well you'll still legally be Mrs Blah even if you pretend not to be". As far as I know this isn't true but I don't know if I'm right, nor do I have the right reply when people say this to me. As I said, I know it's no biggie but it's really irritating me.

If you have the luck of having a lovely birth surname, and you love it and want to keep it, then do so. If you want to change, like I did, then do it. I thought part of feminism was about women having the right to make our own choices.

My birth surname was very close to an antisocial bodily function. Imagine being a primary school kid in that situation

Which could have been avoided by your mother keeping her name and your father changing his.

I'll dig them up and get them to do that, shall I?

No just pointing out as others have done the peculiarly high incidence of woman having terrible birth names. You miss the point that if this name was so terrible why didn't your father leap at the chance of getting rid of it when he married?

@OlennasWimple it's interesting that marriage, for women, gives a socially acceptable reason for changing an unwanted surname without offending family members. They would presumably view it as an expected change and not feel negatively towards it, as they might if a woman just changed their name as a single adult via deed poll.

Or alternatively, rather than doing any corpse bothering, you could just not make it all about you, and instead accept that there's a legitimate discussion to be had about why women with embarrassing names are more likely to change theirs and not inflict them on their children, but men aren't.

I'd ask him but alas, Doctor Who borrowed my time machine and hasn't returned it.

If I had to guess though, I'd imagine he felt differently about it than I did. But I expect you could have worked that out for yourself.

If I had to guess though, I'd imagine he felt differently about it than I did. But I expect you could have worked that out for yourself.

It's almost like him feeling differently about it than you did is kind of the point...

If anyone asks, I just say I love my name and I have it for over 30 years before I got married. They just shut up after that. There's only ever one person (the double glazing guy) who insisted giving us the cert as Mr and Mrs DH. Everyone else is happy to just use Mr DHname and Ms DHname. (it's actually Dr but i'm happy with Ms too).

Oh and I'm happy with Miss too. So essentially I'm happy with any of Miss, Ms or Dr. I object to Mrs. Because I will not be defined by a title that says I'm a married woman.

Kennehora - you said But no pain when you changed it on marriage?

Well, my dad was sad because the surname is probably going to die out with my generation (or this branch of it at least, and it's a very very rare surname in the UK so there aren't many other branches of it out there). But as Assassinated said:

it's interesting that marriage, for women, gives a socially acceptable reason for changing an unwanted surname without offending family members. They would presumably view it as an expected change and not feel negatively towards it, as they might if a woman just changed their name as a single adult via deed poll

Maybe in a couple of generations changing surname on marriage will be far less common, and then we can have conversations about motivation and pressures and choices. But it's ridiculous to ignore the fact that for most of us (I'm mid 40s, which I think it similar to most FWR regulars) we grew up with the outright expectation that a woman would change her name on marriage; that a woman who didn't do that was weird; where little girls who had a crush on a pop star would practice writing their name with his surname; and just about everyone who you knew at school had the same name as their parents.

My big stand has been that I am not and never will be known as Mrs Bill Wimple. I know that it is technically correct to be addressed in the "Princess Michael of Kent" way, and that Mrs Olenna Wimple is for divorced women, but I was happy to take DH's surname, I wasn't prepared to take his first name too

did she voluntarily take on a 'worse' (in your opinion) name when your parents got married?

My parents got married in the early 1950s. She couldn't even have a bank account of her own. Her wages from her job in a school had to go into a bank account that was countersigned by her father. She had to give up her job the moment she got married. Do you think she gave a moments thought to taking on a different surname name when she married?

I think it's completely reasonable to talk about a woman's age and time of marriage being relevant factors. If the average age on FWR is mid 40s then I'm a generation below that, so cannot speak to how it was for you. It's just that this requires acceptance that women didn't/don't make a totally individual choice independent of any societal context, and that their stated reasons might not be the whole story, which obviously some people (not you Olenna) get very upset about.

Olenna put it beautifully and I agree, I think that changing names will become less frequent as time goes by, and that can only be a good thing, as long as it's a choice made freely.

Alpha but Miss defines you by your marital status and arguably keeps you on the level of a girl - there's a video somewhere where Camille Paglia discusses the invention of Ms by Gloria Steinem - she says it was to address the failing in English (unlike some other languages) that a woman retains Miss regardless of her age (and thus status in society), whereas in other language a woman becomes Madame, for example, regardless of her marital state. So Ms bridged that, as well as bringing women in line with men who do not have to demonstrate their marital status every time their title is used.

it still won't be a truly feminist choice until men also make the choice when they marry. Many men don't care if their wife keeps her name but I doubt many of them consider for a second changing theirs. So still not an equal action.

I love 'Ms' and have been one since I was about 14. Some people seem to have a visceral hatred of it though.

No you aren't 'legally Mrs X' and I can't believe this is still an issue in 2019 ! I got married early 90s and the only thing I changed was from Miss to Ms (keeping my maiden name). A bit of fuss from husband, a bit more from Pils when they found out (but that's another story), otherwise surprisingly little comment for the time. Isn't it fine to change or not, just do what suits you best. Congratulations on your marriage OP

I dislike the actual sound of ms when you say it and hate how difficult some people seem to find "hearing" it. It's like it's on another soundwave both because of the sound of the word but also because it is not expected. I was Ms for a long time despite this but now use Dr, which seems to bring with it a whole other dimension of embarrassment which I wasn't expecting...!

I agree with Olenna's post above. These things take time. I remember when I realised I didn't have to change my name (maybe 7 or 8 years old), and I felt really grounded in who I am. It didn't stop me scrawling my firstname next to celebrity surnames - oddball that I am!

I love 'Ms' and have been one since I was about 14. Some people seem to have a visceral hatred of it though.

Yeah, that's me. I don't know why I dislike it so much, but I really do. I know why I should use it rather than Mrs, but I really can't bring myself to do so

We have 4 different surnames in our household and its not been a problem.

I have my name
Husband has his name
Kids have my name - his name
Step kids have their mums name - his name

No one has ever found this counfusing or asked lots of questions about it . Ive had the occasional raised eyebrow which i give the aforementioned Paddington hard stare. I must be bloody terrifying !

The few times anyone has asked me about our names, I reply as if they had asked me “ why didnt your husband change his name when he married you? “.

So person filling in forms askes for names and marital status. When i say married they say “ oh I assumed cohabiting , is X your own name ?“.

So i say “ yes X is my own surname and Y is my husband’s own surname. Neither of us use anyone else’s name “.

“ why didn’t you change your name? “

“ my husband didnt want to change his name, he’d had it for 35 years and was very attached to it. I know lots of women would object but I love him and wanted him to be happy.” Etc etc

“ Didn’t you want to all have the same name ?”

“ My husband didnt want to change his name. For some reason he thought it would affect his career and be so much unnessaary paperwork. So I guess it doesn't bother him. “

Why is it so crazy to believe people change their names because they have a difficult to spell/pronounce name?

Because 'people' don't change their names for these reasons.

Women do.

I'm sure you know lots of Polish men who have married British women and also have names which are difficult to spell/pronounce. How many of them have taken their wife's name?

I have a male friend whose Turkish father changed the spelling of their name to the phonetic version when they moved here in the 70s. Still the same name, but they felt it reduced confusion over the pronunciation.

Why didn't he do what so many women say they do in these circumstances, and take his wife's name? Problem solved!