Random question for the married folks (mostly the women): did you or your spouse change your name when you got married, and why or why not?
I didn’t change my name when I got married, for several reasons:
I had published under my maiden name, so I now considered it my professional name
Laziness
It’s my name. Why should I change my name?
This was 25ish years ago, of course I had to deal with the passive-aggressive resistance of my family: my grandmother-in-law gave us towels monogrammed with my husband’s initials as a wedding present; all my relatives would write us gift checks to “Mr. and Mrs. John Mount”. Strangers addressed me as “Mrs. Mount.” It’s fine. I just laughed and shook my head.
But I always thought I was standing at the edge of the end of an era, that feminism would out and that eventually not changing one’s name would be the norm. Or that married couples would do what some friends of ours did, where both partners changed their names: John Smith and Mary Jones became Mr. and Mrs Smith Jones.
But it hasn’t happened. My female cousins, all much younger than me, for the most part changed their names. All my younger friends have changed their names. Or at best, the woman has taken on both names, and the man stuck with just his own.
There are good reasons for both spouses to have the same last name, not least because it’s nice to have the same last name as one’s children. But both spouses changing their name would solve that, in a more equitable fashion. And what’s the standard practice in same-sex marriages? To change your names, or to keep your own?
