(no subject)

[xiphias]

So, I'm about to talk about something that's really been bugging me, that's being done by lots of my friends, many of whom will read this. And so I'm afraid I'm going to be offensive. So I ask for your forgiveness in advance; please understand that I am being irrational. I have no reason to be bothered by this; it's not even my place to have an opinion about it, and I have no right to find this bothersome.

Okay, first, I want to see if I can use a cut-tag here. . .



I can't think of a wedding I've been to, except my own, in which the woman didn't take the man's last name. And it's driving me nuts. I just can't stand it.

See, here's the thing: just about every bride I know considered whether she would take her husband's last name. And then decided to do so. And it really, really bothers me. It just seems creepy and strange.

In some ways, my friends who just knew from the time they were young girls that they would take their husbands' names, that's easier for me to understand. It was just not even something they considered. They knew what they were going to do. It wasn't a question.

And that bugs me, but not as much as the pattern in which people who I've always know to be feminists and strong willed and having their own personalities and lives and everything give up their names.

See, here's the thing. In almost every case, women say they're making this decision for specific reasons which are personal to them, and that their choice to take their husbands' names does not form a general rule; they're a special case. Maybe they've just always hated their name. Maybe their husband is the only [Insert String Here] of his generation and there are about four hundred of [Wife's Last Name] of her generation. Maybe the wife has a really weird name and is just as happy giving up having to explain to everyone how to spell it. . .

I mean, the main reasons given boil down to, "My name is rarer than my husband's, therefore I'll change my name to make it easier for everyone," and "My name is more common than my husband's, therefore I'll change my name because we need to preserve his."

I don't get it.

And the other half of it is that I can't understand why the husbands stand for it. Or how. If Lis had wanted to change her name to mine, that might have been a deal-breaker for the wedding. It seems downright ghoulish to have someone take your name upon marriage; it's just creepy. I mean, I fell in love with Lis as Lis Riba; a person who came from a family, with a culture and relatives and all that were all part of the package of who Lis Riba is -- when I married Lis, I joined not only with her but with all the Ribas. And if she had changed her name, that would have been a rejection of that fact. That would just have squicked me terribly.

So, for Ghu's sake, WHY THE HELL ARE ALL YOU FOLKS DOING THIS? I mean, every individual case makes sense -- you all have reasons in your particular cases. And, some of them are really good reasons: those of my friends who have absolutely no contact with their birth families, and feel very close to the families they are marrying into -- it makes sense for them to take on the other last name. But it never goes the other way -- husbands with no contact with their birth families who are close to the family into which they are marrying don't ever change their names in my experience.

I'm not being rational, because this isn't a rational response. This is a squick response. And I need to understand this, and get over this, because I just found out that the friends who asked me to officiate at their wedding next year, will be doing this. And I need to get over my squick response here, or I will have great trouble officiating, and I really want to officiate for them.

Can y'all help? Can you explain why this is done? I'm just feeling like such a freak now, because, to me, it's just so squicksome. And apparently, women don't find it a burden, and men like it. I can't understand that, and I need to.

Comments

[ruddigore.livejournal.com]

Hi. You don't know me and we have no friends in common as far as I can tell. I won't bother to explain how I ended up here since it's not germane to anything but, since no one ever answered your question, I thought I'd give it a try (as someone who has taken her husband's name). Just a few quick thoughts:

Not everyone places as much importance in a name as it seems you do, or perceives changing their name as a rejection of anything, any more than I rejected the color red when I changed out of my red sweats and into the black ones. Some people (like my husband and myself) couldn't care less about a name. We'd both be just as happy with any surname whatsoever, provided it wasn't hard to pronounce or likely to provoke hysterical laughter. It doesn't have anything to do with who we are or who our families are. My family would continue to exist, just as it is in every respect, if we all had different surnames and our original surname disappeared off the face of the earth. Wouldn't matter a bit; our name isn't what or who we are.

My husband and I wanted to have the same surname because we've made a commitment to each other and wanted our names to reflect that. Again, it doesn't matter what the name is. It could just as readily have been mine without either of us caring. The fact that it wasn't was mostly in deference to tradition. Needless to say, if we'd had to bend ourselves into unnatural shapes to abide by this tradition, we wouldn't have done so. The tradition just happened to be in keeping with what we wanted, which was to share the same surname.

You say that it would have been a deal-breaker if your wife had wanted to take your name. I can readily understand that there are differences of opinion that are indicative of disagreements too fundamental to ever get past, but I'm kind of astonished that this should ever be one of them. A vivisectionist and an animal rights activist may never be able to live together amicably, but it's not clear to me what it is about changing one's name that is so repellent to you as to cause you to reject someone to whom you were considering making a lifetime commitment. Your use of the words "ghoulish" and "creepy" is so extreme as to be, well, not rational (your words). You haven't offered any explanation for your feelings other than that you are squicked and the squick is irrational. That being said, it seems to me that this can't be explained to you by anyone else. You'll have to look within yourself for the answer.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

One thing about this is that, while there are no followups to this right here, I did get a lot of my friends who did change their names phoning me, emailing me, and so forth, and I think I started to get a bit of an inkling of what it was they meant.

A lot of them looked at the issue the same way that you do, or similarly.

I am interested in how you ended up here, although more because I'm just interested in people in general.

[ruddigore.livejournal.com]

I think I ended up here in some circuitous fashion whilst trying to understand the kerfuffle on ginmar's lj - which still makes no sense to me at all, and on which I've given up at this point. I usually read her for the insights into conditions in Iraq and some unrelated fannish things, but rarely comment because I don't always agree with her and she's pretty volatile. I don't know how much of that is her personality and how much is stress and strain from her situation. I enjoy a good disagreement but only as long as there's some attempt at logical argument and tolerance on all sides; I'm not comfortable with name calling or personal attacks and, once they begin, nothing ever gets resolved. My family is the kind that, in lieu of constructing an actual argument, will state their position increasingly forcefully/loudly. That doesn't impress me and when I find it on lj, I silently wander away and equally silently come back when it's over. I've found some genuine kindred spirits on lj but sometimes the thing I enjoy most about it is that, unlike real life, when people get crazy I can just walk away.

[surrealestate.livejournal.com]

Hey there. I got to this entry via the link you left in Angel's LJ.

I'm not married, but I do have opinions on this. I agree with you about the disturbing trend of the woman so often taking the man's last name. If, as the previous commenter notes, the name doesn't matter, but it's just about sharing, then why not take her name? That excuse, on a large scale, rings to me as just that -- an excuse.

My personal feeling is that if/when I do marry, I would like to share a name with my spouse as well as my children. It is not a dealbreaker for me, though. If he doesn't want to share the last name that I and our children have, well, that's his choice. :) But I think odds are good we can find something agreeable.

As to what the name would be, well, I am very open to possibilities. I always figured that my spouse and I would discuss the issue at length to find a name (mine, theirs, an entirely different one) that we both liked. I've never been terribly attached to my own, so the idea of changing it is okay. My ex, who often talked of marriage before he split, liked my name and said he'd be happy to take it. His last name happens to work very awkwardly with my first, so that seemed like a good plan to me.

(I should note that I do not like hyphenation. Darn lack of scalability.)