Oh My God I Have So Many Thoughts On Changing Your Last Name After Marriage

oh my god I have so many thoughts on changing your last name after marriage

my husband and I had a thousand discussions about it and ended up deciding to hyphenate our names. no, not just me. he was Mr X, I was Ms Y - now he's Mr X-Y and I'm Mrs X-Y

the rationale behind that was that if marriage is a creation of new family from two existing ones, then both families should be reflected in the surname. I said that if he's not changing his surname, I will stay with mine as well. he actively chose changing his surname

we also discussed not changing our names and having potential kids named X-Y but that felt weird.

I said I don't want to change my name to his because my name is a part of my life and person. zero objections

our surnames are in different languages so it's very clear which surname came from him and which from me

and oh my god. the number of people who will disregard his new surname and call him Mr X is astounding. even when he corrects them and says his name is X-Y, they just say "yeah, sure". some will even double down on calling him X. he said it's a great test for meeting new people. some men treat his decision to change his name like an open warfare on their masculinity.

meanwhile, guess how many people referred to me by my previous name? that's right, 0, everyone respects the husband's added name.

we had people react to our names enthusiastically, like at a bank - these were all women.

there is no point to this story, just that society's views on names and marriages are weird

it's crazy how many super duper patriarchal things get retroactively justified in the name of being about love. yeah I'm sure women taking their husbands surname has always 100% been about recovering from trauma and distancing yourself from abusive family or whatever and has absolutely nothing at all to do with women being seen as property. great work here everyone, marriage as a concept has been redeemed through the power of pop psychology