Hyphenated names--they must be stopped (1 Viewer)

[Jeff Gatie]

Yup, it gets into banking! For instance, if you forget your account number, how can you get access to your account/PIN by giving them your mother's maiden name if she does not have one???

 

[MarkHastings]

I'd have no problems with it, except for one big difference...When a woman takes a mans name, she isn't belittled, but if a man took a womans name, just imagine the name calling he'd recieve from other men.

I think if I could do it without anyone even raising an eyebrow, it wouldn't bother me one bit.

And not to get into a amajor religious discussion, but does it say anything about taking on a mans name? I would think that if you were wed in a religious ceremony and the text indicated that the woman was to take on the mans name, then it should be so.

As far as JoP's, I don't know what the ettiquite is on that.

 

[Casey Trowbridg]

I would consider it, I’ve got to admit. Actually, everytime I sign my name at the bank or on another form, I am always told that I should consider changing my name and making it shorter. Part of this is because I have larger than normal hand writing due in part that I learned to read and write using large print. If I were doing it for that reason alone then the name would have to be significantly shorter than my own if its 8 or 9 letters I’d do just as well to leave it alone. Though, if it ultimately comes to it, I probably wouldn’t end up making the change but I wouldn’t dismiss it completely.
I’d just like to say that my reason for why I might change may be considered odd, but if we were standing face to face discussing this you’d probably understand.

 

[Nathan*W]

My wife never once considered hyphenating or keeping her maiden name. She DID briefly flirt with the idea of ditching her middle name and using her maiden name in its place. She ended up just changing her last name. Her reasoning was that her parents had put a lot of thought into her first and middle names and she didn't want to throw that out the window. When I asked her about this thread, she said she couldn't imagine her current name being anything other than what it is.

My sister, however, migrated her maiden name into a second middle name. Thus, she signs documents with two middle initials.

I respect people's choice to do whatever they want, but when I encounter a hyphenated name, I will only use the last part of it in verbal conversations. The whole thing becomes too much of a mouthful.

 

[Jeff Perry]

Oh, they have. The institution of marriage is failing. People don't marry for life anymore; half of all marriages are destined to fail, so why dive in head first? Keep your name, keep your possessions, and keep your distance, just in case. No need to tie a bunch of knots we can't easily undo. Sounds to me like people got over it just fine.

Suffice it to say this isn't my idea of a marriage. When I said "to have and to hold, in sickness and in health, 'till death do us part", I damn well meant it. And you can bet I wouldn't have said it to someone who had any intention of keeping herself at arm's length from me.

 

[Julie K]

My point is that I don't ask anyone's permission to be who I am.

Part of that, a small part, is my name. It's unusual where I live and I happen to like it a great deal. People generally link it to a very different locale than where it really originates in the world and they generally mangle what should be a simple pronounciation. I get loads of fun out of it.

Anyway, I simply would not consider changing it. Much like I would not consider changing my love of cats or deciding to chuck my HP Lovecraft collection because some guy hates slimy things in the dark.

While it may look good in print and sound nice when spoken, the notion that my statement of ideals is out of respect to a prospective husband is off the mark. My statement of ideals, and the notion that I don't have to find someone who 'lets' me do something, is a measure of respect for myself.

I am not married, however. If I were to get married, it would certainly not be a traditional ceremony nor in any way shape or form religous in nature. I've probably cut out a great number of prospective husbands right there, so the name thing is really minor compared to the rest of me

 

[DonRoeber]

Please, keep in mind that eveyone has a different feeling about what marriage is and what it means to them. Legally, marriage means you save some money on taxes and inherritance laws become a little bit easier to deal with. After that, it's all between the two people involved in the union. My wife and I have our own feelings about marriage, my parents have theirs, my in-laws have theirs, and my friends have theirs. My wife and I are very happy with the decisions that we have made in our life, even if not everyone agrees with them. So please avoid making sweeping statements that marrige is failing, people who don't change their names aren't commited to each other, etc... it's offensive to people who have thought about these issues and decided that they want to live their lives differently than how you think they should be lived.

 

[andrew markworthy]

My own surname is hyphenated (yes, I know I'm using a pseudonym - as I've mentioned in other posts, when I joined HTF I was having an unpleasant time being 'cyber stalked' by a somewhat disturbed individual and didn't want to give him too easy a target by using my real name; just look up my email to find out my real name, but please don't repeat it in a thread).

Mine became hyphenated because I was the last in the line on my mother's side of the family, and my mum's side of the family, though fairly infertile, wanted their name perpetuating and were very vociferous. I'd never intended using it, and through school I managed to use just the second half of the surname. However, by a clerical error at university, I 'officially' got landed with my full surname. Actually, in one respect it's been handy, as there are quite a few guys in my profession with the second part of the surname, but the hyphenated version is unique and it helps reduce confusion. However, in other respects it can be a real pain:

(1) in the UK, a hyphenated surname usually indicates being upper class or having pretentions above your social station (I'm definitely in the latter category).

(2) people always seem to misspell it. At times this is mildly irritating or even amusing, but at other times it's really annoying. I'm an academic, and my citation index is lower than I'd like, in part because my papers and books are cited under at least three variants of my surname

(3) it is too long for credit cards, official registers, booking forms, etc

Incidentally, my wife and kids have my hyphenated name as well. When we married my wife refused point blank to retain her surname. I entirely agree with Julie - I see no reason why because of my gender I have the right to label a partner as 'my' property. However, my wife took the view that it made things simpler(and as she has a brown belt in karate, no way was I going to argue with her ).

 

[Ricardo C]

I completely agree with Julie.

I used to think a wife taking the husband's name was no big deal, until someone asked me how I would feel about giving up my name. When I get married, I won't ask my wife to take my name. And if she does, then I'll take hers. And if we have kids... Well, I guess we'll flip a coin

It's even more backwards down here, where a married woman will be legally known as *first name* *middle name* *her maiden name* DE (meaning "belonging to") *husband's name*

Saddling your wife with your family name has got nothing to do with tradition or religion, it's rooted in plain old machismo. If your wife wants to do it, then God bless. But to judge the quality of a relationship by someone's position on the issue is pretty damn clos-minded.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

It is still no big deal for many, many women and for some it's (GASP!) an honor.

 

[Leila Dougan]

For me, it does too. In fact if it didn't I wouldn't have considered changing my name at all. I think a women should change her name because she *wants* to, not because she feels pressured or coerced into doing so. For me, I was on the fence about it but the two things that led me to doing so were:

1) I wanted our family to all have the same last name. This wasn't that important to my parents or to me as a child but now that I have my own family, it has become important to me.

2) Because of #1, we could have gone with any last name, be it his, mine, a combination of the two, or a hyphenated name. My husband didn't want to change his name at all, for a variety of reasons including the fact that he's the last male to carry on the family name.

I changed my name because him having his name was more important to him than me keeping mine was. I don't consider myself pressured or coerced into doing so and he would have still married me had I kept my maiden name. But in the end, I considered it a compromise. It just made him so much more happy that I changed my name than it would have made me happy to keep mine. I've adjusted and now it's not a big deal.

Now mind you, had changing my name been a bigger deal that it was (ie, I was definitly NOT on the fence about it) I wouldn't have changed my name. We would have just gotten married and adjusted to having different names.

When I made my decision to change my name I had to realize that I wasn't doing this just for him, but for "us". It was a decision I made, not one that was made for me. And most importantly, because it was my decision I could never throw it back in his face later on down the line. So I spent about 6 mos during our engagement grappling with my dilemma, weighing the pros and cons and my decision was to change my name.

Mark and Casey, thank you for being honest about changing your name. Certainly it's difficult if a male were to decide to change because of society's pressure not to, like Mark pointed out. And Casey, I understand your practical reasons for wanting to as well.

I think, though, that there are a lot of men in Ricardo's position. It just seems easy and natural for a woman to change her name that a lot of men don't stop and consider what that might mean to them. All religous factors aside, society does still expect women to become part of the man. Things are changing, yes, but those thoughts still linger. The hardest thing I've found is maintaining an identity outside of my husband's. I still feel sometimes that the expectation is for the man to take care of everything and the woman live in his shadows. We just bought a house a few weeks ago and everyone made the assumption that my husband would be primary and I would be secondary. It doesn't bother me that he *is* primary (after all, one of us had to be) but rather that it was the assumption.

I'm 24 so I can't really comment on how things have changed even in the last 20 years. I do know that while I still feel stifled now and then, it's much much better than it used to be. My mom (who was married in the 70s) told me that when she got married she had trouble getting a credit card in her name only. Every bank she visited demanded my father be put on the same account, which neither of them wanted. Finally she convinced a bank to get one for her, but what a battle!

And Julie I agree with you 100%.

The choices we made regarding our wedding and marriage reflect who we are and what we want. We had a fairly traditional wedding and I suppose we have a fairly traditional marriage (sans religion). "Tradition" isn't a package deal though. In other words, each couple needs keep what they like and scrap the rest. That is exactly what we did.

That important thing is that my husband and I agree and what it is we agree on is irrelevant. Just because our flavor or marriage doesn't work for my parents or his parents, or any of our friends doesn't mean it's not valid or that we're contributing to the demise of society.

 

[Ricardo C]

And I said that if the woman's actually for it, then godspeed. Seems you conveniently skipped that part of my post.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

I also skipped the part where you said it is machismo, instead of tradition. Sorry, I'm not gonna go there. I have no idea what a person's motivation for "saddling" a woman with their name and I don't claim to either.

 

[Ricardo C]

I didn't mean it was a conscious reason, Jeff. I'm sorry it came out that way. I was just saying that the root of the practice lies there, even if modern men don't see it that way. To you it's a representation of the union, but the origin of it is less romantic than that.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

To me it is not a representation of the union, it is a tradition. I could care less what other people do, I've known people who hate tradition and go out of their way to break it. I happen to love tradition and think we can learn a lot about the past by studying and keeping alive its traditions. To each his own, but just because someone appreciates tradition does not mean they are a chauvinist or that they do not respect women.

 

[Ricardo C]

Which is what I'm trying to say. My point was that the tradition has less romantic origins than we'd like to think, not that the people who currently practice it ARE chauvinists.

 

[Jeff Gatie]

Actually what you said was "Saddling your wife with your family name has got nothing to do with tradition or religion...", which is why I felt the need to reply. The origins of a tradition may lie in the culture and times the tradition was begun but that is no reason to reject the tradition. The practice of taking the husband's name may have origins rooted in machismo, but the times certainly have changed and we cannot assume that a wife who does it now is subservient or oppressed (or even traditional). For example, I have a friend who is a hard-core feminist, yet she took her husband's name because she hated her father and wanted no trace of him in her life. Like I said, different strokes.

 

[Ricardo C]

I agree completely. I just worded my post very poorly. I'll just play my "English is my second language!" card and throw myself at the mercy of the court

 

[Malcolm R]

Hmmm, kinda makes you wonder if anyone here at HTF is actually using their real name?

 

[andrew markworthy]

Yes, Malcolm R. If that is your real surname, then be careful if your family visits Britain. Announcing 'we're the Rs' will perhaps not get the reaction you expected.