Marriage and changing names

[wmw999 2,447]

Is your name important to you? Do you identify with it? Would it be hard to give it up?

It's the same for women. I took a different name when I got married (we talked about the options), but it was extremely hard the first time he wrote "Mr and Mrs R Wilkinson." I felt like I had lost myself, and had become an extension of him, a piece of the married couple only, and not the piece that needed to be identified. It was always easier to write "Robert and Wendy" or "Wendy and Robert."

Yes, it's standard. But it's hard if you've worked hard to make an identity for yourself. People from college can't look you up in the phone book any more when they happen to be in town; it's like a piece of you is lost in some ways. Yes, you gain a piece by being married, but in name terms, you gain a piece of your husband by marrying and taking his name, but you gain it at the expense of that piece of yourself. It's not like that for men who keep their names.

I have a cousin whose husband took her name.

Wendy W.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)

[SkymonkeyONE 4]

I had an army buddy in Germany who was actually paid (by dowry) to take his wife's name. He did it for the money and he didn't really like his own family name anyway.

[Shotgun 1]

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In the case of your question above, it's simply because that's the "standard" way of tracking bloodlines and relations; through the family name of the husbands/male.

I personally don't make such decisions based on what the general population's "standard" is.... And I wouldn't marry anyone who did. (Rich would never tell me the children were getting his last name because that was the "standard" - well, not unless he was making a joke anyway.)

But of course it makes no difference to me if other people want to follow such standards or traditions...