Women taking their husband’s names always baffled me. I’ve known since I was a teenager that I wasn’t going to. Aside from genealogic traceability and simplified familial paperwork, why on earth would I agree to be absorbed into some man I hadn’t even met yet? And who might turn out to be a huge mistake? I’ve lost track of all my female friends and relatives now carting around the last names of men they’ve been divorced from for more than twenty years. But it isn’t the possibility of divorce that makes me object to women taking men’s names; its just the plain unvarnished, sexist truth of what it means. As one of my aunts famously said in leaving her husband after a long, troubled marriage, “I understand all about man and wife becoming one, but how come we always have to be you?” Symbols matter and that was one I simply couldn’t stomach just as I could never stomach changing my citizenship. Don’t ask me why those seem equivalent but they do to me. Even worse, to me, are hyphenated names. What a cop out; change your name or don’t, girlfriend. Lordy, those godawful amalgamated, frankenstein names.
What I was up for was picking a new name we’d both take or flipping a coin to choose one of our surnames. Too bad I never thought of hiring a consultant or underwriting an internet survey to basically focus-group the new couple’s potential new name. Ah, if only we’d had the internet. I’m glad to know I’m not the only one who agonized over the whole whose-last-name thing.
