Why shouldn't I take my wife's surname?

I'm getting married in August, and my fianceé and I have provisionally decided to take her surname. I wasn't particularly fussed as I don't see my family relationships as being tied to a name, and her preference (though not that strong) was to keep her own name. We want to have the same surname, so it just seems to make sense. The only reason we could think of not to take her name was that it's not traditional, but that seems like an embarrassingly bad reason.

What do you guys think? Taking a wife's surname seems to be a pretty controversial issue but I just can't get my head around why when 80% of all women take their husband's surnames and nobody bats an eyelid. Are there any good reasons at all for this? Because I can't think of any!

Reply 1

Asolare

20

I didn't realise this was even an issue still in 2016 :tongue:

I can't see any problem;

Wanna take husband's surname? Cool
Wanna take wife's surname? Cool
Wanna double-barrel them? Cool
Wanna leave you both with different surnames? Cool

It's a very weird thing to get angsty about.

Reply 2

Fenneko

20

Original post by Implication

What do you guys think? Taking a wife's surname seems to be a pretty controversial issue

And here I was initially thinking that it was a custom.
-
*Edit*, whoops, got them mixed up. Yes, you would be in the minority. I'm certain that you have to go through some legal stuff in order for it to work.

(edited 8 years ago)

Reply 3

Tank Girl

13

Original post by Implication

I'm getting married in August, and my fianceé and I have provisionally decided to take her surname. I wasn't particularly fussed as I don't see my family relationships as being tied to a name, and her preference (though not that strong) was to keep her own name. We want to have the same surname, so it just seems to make sense. The only reason we could think of not to take her name was that it's not traditional, but that seems like an embarrassingly bad reason.

What do you guys think? Taking a wife's surname seems to be a pretty controversial issue but I just can't get my head around why when 80% of all women take their husband's surnames and nobody bats an eyelid. Are there any good reasons at all for this? Because I can't think of any!

Has anyone been giving you grief about this? And if yes- what's their reasoning?... I'd be interested to hear it!

Reply 4

abc101

17

I don't see why anybody should take either's surname. The person you are doesn't change when you get married. I've been who I am my whole life, I'm not changing my name for any reason. It's a good point you raise that it's just seen as standard for women to change their names so it shouldn't be an issue for a man to but tradition has a lot of answer for I guess. The changing name thing reeks of women being transferred as property from one man to another and I hate it.

Reply 5

Rum Ham

20

I don't think its weird at all. Screw tradition. When it comes to wedding, taking names etc - you do what you and your partner want to do, not what society deems as acceptable. Me and my bf have had many comments about conventional things about what we are doing for a wedding and all that jazz too but screw them, its our day and life.

Reply 6

MsTabitha

1

I would never, not in a million years, take my husband's surname & am always amazed that so many women do so seemingly unthinkingly. Often, I think women change their names & become Mrs because they believe that they have to, not realising that it's not at all mandatory.

Females are given their father's name at birth. Traditionally, this signified that the girl belonged to her father. At the point of marriage, the father gives the girl away & she takes her husband's name to signify she now belongs to him. Erm, no thanks. I do not wish to be given away & I'll keep my own name, thanks awfully.I also dislike the titles Miss & Mrs. Why does a female's marital staus require to be advertised via her title? It doesn't & I'll only ever use Ms.

If you want to adopt your wife's surname, do so, there is no good reason why you shouldn't.

Reply 7

Death Grips

5

Original post by Implication

I'm getting married in August, and my fianceé and I have provisionally decided to take her surname. I wasn't particularly fussed as I don't see my family relationships as being tied to a name, and her preference (though not that strong) was to keep her own name. We want to have the same surname, so it just seems to make sense. The only reason we could think of not to take her name was that it's not traditional, but that seems like an embarrassingly bad reason.

What do you guys think? Taking a wife's surname seems to be a pretty controversial issue but I just can't get my head around why when 80% of all women take their husband's surnames and nobody bats an eyelid. Are there any good reasons at all for this? Because I can't think of any!

The erosion of your power in the relationship has to start from somewhere. Right now its your surname, but soon enough you'll end up like this:

Good luck mate, you'll need it.

Reply 8

Death Grips

5

Original post by MsTabitha

I would never, not in a million years, take my husband's surname & am always amazed that so many women do so seemingly unthinkingly. Often, I think women change their names & become Mrs because they believe that they have to, not realising that it's not at all mandatory.

Females are given their father's name at birth. Traditionally, this signified that the girl belonged to her father. At the point of marriage, the father gives the girl away & she takes her husband's name to signify she now belongs to him. Erm, no thanks. I do not wish to be given away & I'll keep my own name, thanks awfully.I also dislike the titles Miss & Mrs. Why does a female's marital staus require to be advertised via her title? It doesn't & I'll only ever use Ms.

If you want to adopt your wife's surname, do so, there is no good reason why you shouldn't.

Well with that attitude most guys wont want to marry you anyway, and the only guys that will, will be be weak pushovers. Good luck.

Reply 9

rockrunride

19

My mate did it. I probably would too if my other half was adamant about keeping her surname.

Reply 10

JBLondon

3

I'd like my children to have my surname, but if my wife decides to keep her surname I wouldn't have an issue with it.

Reply 11

Implication

OP

18

Original post by Death Grips

The erosion of your power in the relationship has to start from somewhere. Right now its your surname, but soon enough you'll end up like this:

Good luck mate, you'll need it.

Fortunately I'm not insecure enough to see my relationship as some kind of childish power struggle!

Reply 12

MsTabitha

1

Original post by Death Grips

Well with that attitude most guys wont want to marry you anyway, and the only guys that will, will be be weak pushovers. Good luck.

Well, you don't sound even slightly insecure.

If someone had a problem with my "attitude" to the use of Mrs & taking their name, rest assured I wouldn't want to marry them. So we're all happy.

However, you aren't the voice of "most guys" & your post certainly doesn't reflect the voices of most of the guys I know.

Reply 13

ABsoluteX

2

Much easier to just follow tradition than argue about it.

Reply 14

Death Grips

5

Original post by Implication

Fortunately I'm not insecure enough to see my relationship as some kind of childish power struggle!

lol mate, maybe you're above it, but how well do you really know your fiancee?

Everything in life is a power struggle, especially romantic relationships - it cant be helped, any time two people dont exactly agree on something, there is going to be a power struggle.

I have been with my gf for 5 years, and we have power struggles. Sure maybe everything is dandy between you and your fiancee now, but you're going to spend the rest of your life with her, and it's not always going to be rosy, and power struggles are only going to become more frequent with time.

All I'm saying is if you dont assert some power now, you're not going to have any in future.

(edited 8 years ago)

Reply 15

Implication

OP

18

Original post by Death Grips

lol mate, maybe you're above it, but how well do you really know your fiancee?

Everything in life is a power struggle, especially romantic relationships - it cant be helped, any time two people dont exactly agree on something, there is going to be a power struggle.

I have been with my gf for 5 years, and we have power struggles. Sure maybe everything is dandy between you and your fiancee now, but you're going to spend the rest of your life with her, and it's not always going to be rosy, and the chance of the relationship turning into power struggles gets higher over time.

All I'm saying is if you dont assert some power now, you're going to have any down the line.

Yes, of course we argue and of course we will argue. But I think you're drawing an extraordinarily tenuous link here. I'm not going to fare any worse in our disagreements just because we share her family name...

But if a name did have that much impact, I wouldn't be much of a fianceé if I insisted that she take the disadvantage instead of me, would I?

n.b. I do kind of understand the point you are making, but our relationship is very un-political in that sense.

(edited 8 years ago)

Reply 16

Implication

OP

18

Original post by Inexorably

I didn't realise this was even an issue still in 2016 :tongue:

I can't see any problem;

Wanna take husband's surname? Cool
Wanna take wife's surname? Cool
Wanna double-barrel them? Cool
Wanna leave you both with different surnames? Cool

It's a very weird thing to get angsty about.

Well my fianceé's family are very religious so we anticipated some negative response there, but until looking into this I didn't realise quite how many people thought it was humiliating, emasculating, demeaning etc. for a man to take his wife's name. It's really been quite a shocker for me - I know there's still a lot of gender- and sex-based prejudice around but didn't think many people would make it this explicit!

Original post by Joel 96

And here I was initially thinking that it was a custom.
-
*Edit*, whoops, got them mixed up. Yes, you would be in the minority. I'm certain that you have to go through some legal stuff in order for it to work.

As far as I'm aware, there's no concept of a 'legal name' in the UK, it's just a matter of changing your name on various different documents e.g. passport, bank accounts etc.

Original post by Tank Girl

Has anyone been giving you grief about this? And if yes- what's their reasoning?... I'd be interested to hear it!

No grief per se. One of my groomsman said something along the lines of 'oh my god how embarrassing' when my fianceé mentioned it to him, though it took all of 30 seconds of chatting for him to change his mind completely. And I think he did actually change his mind; not just pretend to change his mind so it wasn't awkward :tongue:

I feel like as soon as you stop and actually think about why you don't like the idea you realise you're literally just being sexist :dontknow:

When we weren't sure what we were doing name-wise and were still talking about it a lot, we discussed with both our parents and taking her name was mentioned. Neither of them hinted that it would be an issue at all, but when I mentioned to my parents last week that's what we were probably going to do, they didn't seem happy. My mum said something about it having 'implications for the family line'. I pointed out that it only had consequences for the name of the family line, and moreover that precisely the same would have been true for my fianceé if we'd both taken her surname, and very quickly we were back to the 'it's very unusual' talk as if that mattered. I've spoken to both of my parents a couple of times since and my mum has said that it's our decision and not to lose sleep over it, but my dad is definitely not on board. Problem is, whenever I try to pin him down on precisely why it matters that it's not traditional, he just ignores the question and starts suggesting other name possibilities we've already considered 101 times (e.g. double barrell, middle name, new name etc.)

Original post by abc101

I don't see why anybody should take either's surname. The person you are doesn't change when you get married. I've been who I am my whole life, I'm not changing my name for any reason. It's a good point you raise that it's just seen as standard for women to change their names so it shouldn't be an issue for a man to but tradition has a lot of answer for I guess. The changing name thing reeks of women being transferred as property from one man to another and I hate it.

And in my eyes this is almost a reason not to stick with tradition rather than to uphold it!

The reason you give for not wanting to change your name is very close to my reason for not changing my name - the person I am won't change just because I change my name, so why not? It will have negligible professional consequences for my career, for example.

Original post by MsTabitha

I would never, not in a million years, take my husband's surname & am always amazed that so many women do so seemingly unthinkingly. Often, I think women change their names & become Mrs because they believe that they have to, not realising that it's not at all mandatory.

Females are given their father's name at birth. Traditionally, this signified that the girl belonged to her father. At the point of marriage, the father gives the girl away & she takes her husband's name to signify she now belongs to him. Erm, no thanks. I do not wish to be given away & I'll keep my own name, thanks awfully.I also dislike the titles Miss & Mrs. Why does a female's marital staus require to be advertised via her title? It doesn't & I'll only ever use Ms.

If you want to adopt your wife's surname, do so, there is no good reason why you shouldn't.

Kudos, that's a very strong position to take.

One of the problems we have is that we don't really want to seen to be 'making a statement', we just want to be able to change our names without anyone fussing over it. It's really quite disappointing that we can't.

Thanks all for your comments :smile:

Reply 17

Drewski

19

Original post by MsTabitha

I would never, not in a million years, take my husband's surname & am always amazed that so many women do so seemingly unthinkingly. Often, I think women change their names & become Mrs because they believe that they have to, not realising that it's not at all mandatory.

Females are given their father's name at birth. Traditionally, this signified that the girl belonged to her father. At the point of marriage, the father gives the girl away & she takes her husband's name to signify she now belongs to him. Erm, no thanks. I do not wish to be given away & I'll keep my own name, thanks awfully.I also dislike the titles Miss & Mrs. Why does a female's marital staus require to be advertised via her title? It doesn't & I'll only ever use Ms.

If you want to adopt your wife's surname, do so, there is no good reason why you shouldn't.

Hang on, haven't you just outlined reasons why taking someone's name is demeaning and bad and wrong? Why then are you suddenly saying there are "no good reasons" why he shouldn't take her name? Why isn't that a massive double standard?

And isn't there something to be said for the joining of families aspect? You and your future husband will be creating a family together, wouldn't you like that family to have a single identity?

(edited 8 years ago)

Reply 18

Asolare

20

Can confirm also there is no additional ''legal process'' to go through if you wish to take the wife's surname over husband's. It is the same as the wife taking the husband's surname - you simply need to get your name officially changed and get that updated with various institutions and whatnot.