When I hyphenated my last name, adding my husband’s name to my own, the woman at the SS office actually yelled at me, saying no one would ever find my name alphabetically, that we’d have to stand in separate lines at registration areas, etc. I couldn’t understand why she, a stranger, could possibly care. My response was, “If people know the rules of grammar, they will know that my hyphenated last name will go under “C” like it always has.” She glared & just grunted at me through the rest of the transaction.
One of the things I find endlessly fascinating about this topic is that we pretend like women have the choice not to change their names but the subtle and not so subtle pushback is always telling
Yes…hyphenating didn’t seem unusual to me, because my older sister had done so. I married in my late 30’s. I wanted to recognize being a part of my husband’s family, so I took his name, but professionally I was known in my field by my maiden name. When people object to personal decisions such as these my first mental reaction is always “What’s it to you?!?”
She should have told that to all the Luxury-Yacht Brits who hyphenate names to make sure all the wealthy (or titled) male ancestors are noted during roll call. ("It's spelled Luxury Yacht, but it's pronounced throatwobbler mangrove" for you Python fans!)
It’s so funny you say that. My husband & I met a British couple while we were all on a cruise & the Brit guy mentioned that we Americans think we are so posh with our hyphenated names. I had had no idea that was the connotation in the UK…maybe I should have chosen “Day Lewis” or “Bonham Carter”, Lol.
I had my first child in NYC in 2001. I kept my name, but we planned to give the kid my husband’s last name and told the nurse that. She shrugged. “Mother’s baby, fathers maybe.” And she put my name on every form, and my husband had to get my permission to do anything baby related and honestly it was awesome--it made me feel powerful. We are still together, and I feel like a hetero marriage success overall (after a lot of tinkering) but neither of us will ever forget that nurse.
I've given up trying to understand why, but women changing their names to their husbands does make me irrationally angry. I don't talk about with people anymore bc I know it's a personal choice and I don't want to upset people who are rightly excited about their marriage. I also have never been married, but after a massive break up, feel that I have ex-wife energy, we exist!
I had so many complicated responses to this. I will say it prompted a lot of thought about my own choice to change my name when I got married. It was not done uncritically, but I think my understanding of the complex reasons (including, it was just easier given all of the structures that support that choice, as well as my fraught emotional history with my family of origin) has deepened over time. And it deepened further listening to this. Thank you.
I did have a strong response to your celebration of Aubrey referring to herself as hot, though, which I'm still parsing out. To be clear, any woman should get to claim that description of herself if she feels its true. And I have to agree with Aubrey, she is super hot so she should absolutely claim that for herself loudly and proudly. But after both of you expressing exasperation about other women not critically examining their choice to change their names when they got married, it was odd to listen to you celebrate her "hotness", as Aubrey is hot in the patriarchally-acceptable way of straight, thin, white women, so uncritically.
Wait... let me acknowledge that you did complicate the notion of hotness to the extent that you talked about feeling after your own divorce like you had to maintain, or achieve, stereotypical hotness so that people would listen to you. That is critique. I guess what I was missing was any explicit discussion about what the definition of "hot" is, and if we're claiming it then we should also be able to do so if we believe it about ourselves, even if we don't fit the patriarchal definition as Aubrey does.
You can't do everything, or hit every perfect point in every conversation. I'm not suggesting you should. And you might not even agree with me, which is also fine. I guess I'm just musing out loud, so to speak.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment! You're right that we could have been more clear. Lyz and I have been friends for a long time and we both have a really inclusive sense of "hotness" being more a state of mind than an ability to follow the rules of the male gaze. Although we've talked about this between us many times, it probably would have helped for us to say that out loud in the recording! (Also, side note, I understand why I read as straight, but I'm actually not.)
Hi, Aubrey! I really appreciate both of your very open-hearted responses to my comment. It gave me a weirdly high level of anxiety to write it, like I was breaking some cardinal rule of always being unfailingly positive in your response to other women writers. It's nice to be able to have real, nuanced conversation.
Also, heard about you not being straight. I shouldn't have assumed, especially as a bi woman who often gets misread because I was married to a man. My apologies.
And I appreciate these thoughts always. Thanks for expressing them. I do think the conversation drifted in a way I wasn’t prepared for which is a joy of these conversations and I agree a definition of hotness would be helpful especially one that pushes back against patriarchal norms.
The birth name debate is fascinating to me because I am marrying into a Hispanic family and tradition in that culture says any kids we have will take both of our last names, no hyphens. But I almost never see that solution mentioned in discussions of children’s lasts names. It’s always “we’d give her both of our names, but we didn’t like the idea of a hyphen.” Friends, hyphens are not necessary! They can simply have both of your names, side by side. Free yourself from the hyphen!
Two aspects of my own name change which were interesting. One, when I told my mom that I was changing my name she got really mad at me, which totally flummoxed me. I responded, "But you changed your name..." To which she declared, quite dramatically, "You never wanted to be one of us anyway!" I'm realizing now that it wasn't that I didn't want to be one of them, it's that in some important ways I wasn't, ever. The family narrative never included the person I actually am and I didn't want to participate in it anymore. I thought by changing my name I was committing to a different, more authentic story. Little did I know then (So young! So naive!) that I was buying into a story about heterosexual marriage and my ex-husband's notions about all sorts of things that weren't my authentic story either. Thank god for divorce.
The other one had to do with my kids. Weeks after I moved out of our house I was walking with them and my oldest (nine at the time) asked me if I was going to change my name since their dad and I weren't married anymore. I was like, Um, we're still married (he'd already introduced them to his girlfriend), and anyway, what would I change it to? He said my maiden name. My response was, I haven't been that person for so long, which felt deeply true. Then we had a great time imagining all of the totally new names that I could choose once the divorce was finalized. I wish I'd done that, in retrospect, but I wanted the same name as my children, and changing their names would have introduced a level of insanity to what was already a bonkers divorce.
I like the idea of turning a stressful moment of a stressful experience - talking with your kids about part of the divorce process - into a fantasy of names. I think on some level, that "normalized" the process. Eh, something like that. Maybe "parents divorcing can't be totally scary because we can joke about mom choosing a new name!"
The 90% stat was way higher than I thought it was! I kept my last name because it’s cool as fuck (and I’m the last of us!). Most of my friends are either not married (ha) or kept their last names. My favorite is a gal pal whose husband took HER last name.
Today's episode is like the 7th consecutive home run for Lyz (and Zach)!
The conversation about names reminded me that if I could do it all over again I'd either encourage my wife to keep her surname or see if we could come up with a new surname for both of us. My thinking on it has evolved significantly but when we were first engaged it was important to me that she take my last name and it was important to her to keep hers. Her reasoning was similar to what Aubrey mentioned in the podcast about carrying on a family name that otherwise won't be passed down. My reasoning was because when I wanted it to be easier for our hypothetical future children, based on my experiences with a mom who changed her surname multiple times.
I had sorted out my feelings about her keeping her name (and about whether it was important to me that she take mine) by the time of our wedding when she surprised me at the reception by announcing that she would be changing her name. The process of doing it ended up being a giant pain in the ass though. No regrets other than wishing we'd taken the opportunity to do something different.
It’s such a hard complicated issue that is so so personal and of course, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to go there. And of course, I also changed my name and I still have that married name. But it’s so hard when everything is pushing you one way to push against it to do something else.
The ex sent an email to the kids recently and cc'd me (he doesn't communicate directly with me anymore, which is a relief). I saw that he used my first name and birth name, and it made me do a little Grinch evil grin and a chuckle. I thought, "Oh, you WISH I'd stop using your name, don't you."
I got married in 1991 and I remember getting questioned about whether I'd change my name. It seemed such a fraught time for that. Is it still? As it was, I was figuring I would change my name, even though husband's name is lousy (lots of letters, German name with a lousy meaning, etc.) I asked jokingly if he would take my super simple name and no hesitation, he said no, but he didn't care if I didn't take his. But I did because it was a way of signifying outwardly we were a unit. A family, partnership, etc. And down the road, I'm fine with it, but can see that had I not taken it, there would have been ripples of irritation on his family's side.
The funny thing is that on death certificates (in NY at least), the mother and father of the deceased are listed but only the mother's maiden name is listed, regardless of whether she changed her name or not. Nope. Keep it simple for governmental record keeping purposes.
When I was married in Western Australia in the early 80s, legally I automatically acquired my husband's surname. If I'd wanted to keep my name, I would have had to change it back by deed poll. WA has never been a socially progressive state.
Half a dozen years later, in Victoria, the form I had to fill in to register my baby's birth (no phone calls here) gave me a range of options, partly because Victoria has always been socially progressive, but also because it reflected the naming conventions of the many cultures that live here. Not that I deviated from the norm, as my then husband made it clear that there was only one option.
I'm still stuck with what I think of as my Slave Name, due to work reasons, but I will be casting it off as soon as I retire.
Another fantastic show and a guest whose works and many good deeds I will eagerly chase down. Thanks to you both.
In the long-ago daze of undergrad meandering, I had some acquaintances who graduated a year or so ahead of me and got married right after. They both changed their names -- "introducing for the first time Missus and Mister Normal" -- and suffice to say it was NOT the style at the time. Despite having hippie families and an upbringing in lefty politics, their entire social circle lost its mind. I can only hope they remained together (or split and kept their married names) to role model the possibilities for a more optimistic next generation? Keep it going, Aubrey. You never know who will live your lesson.
I saw a pair of friends get married in 2017 and they were introduced after the ceremony as "Mr. and Mrs. HisFullName." Not just the last name--his FULL name! Straight out of the 1950s. I was aghast but never said anything because she didn't seem bothered. And, who knows, maybe she wasn't. But if it were my wedding, I would have fought that DJ on the dance floor.
I never even thought of changing my name when getting married, and I did not. My husband and I never talked about it either. He says he thought I'd change my name, though he wasn't sure why he thought that way. We hyphenated our kids' last names. Two kids later and my husband said okay I'm done, we are a family and one way to see that is the same last name, so I'll change mine. And he did! And we dropped that name from the last name of the kids as well. He talked to his Dad, my Mom, and my Grandma about it, and my Lakota family was quite happy to have my husband change his name to ours.
When I was a young girl, a family friend combined their last names when they got married. So she went by her last name hypen his last name, and so did he! I remember thinking it was such a fun idea.
This was a fantastic episode. I remember discussing name change with my spouse when we got married, and she let me know what a pain in the butt it was.
The part that hit me right between the eyes when I listened this morning was this:
I like my name and I refuse optional paperwork because I'm LAZY. My youngest has my last name and my eldest has my spouse's last name. I didn't mean to make a choice or have this be some sort of statement. This is either evidence of privilege or that I'm oblivious (why not both!). People have the most fascinating reactions to this and really tell on themselves sometimes. But since I'm dull (which I confidently assert, lol) and basically anonymous, reactions, if they occur, are individualized. At that dose they are really amusing in a way I don't think they would be at Internet scale.
When I hyphenated my last name, adding my husband’s name to my own, the woman at the SS office actually yelled at me, saying no one would ever find my name alphabetically, that we’d have to stand in separate lines at registration areas, etc. I couldn’t understand why she, a stranger, could possibly care. My response was, “If people know the rules of grammar, they will know that my hyphenated last name will go under “C” like it always has.” She glared & just grunted at me through the rest of the transaction.
One of the things I find endlessly fascinating about this topic is that we pretend like women have the choice not to change their names but the subtle and not so subtle pushback is always telling
Yes…hyphenating didn’t seem unusual to me, because my older sister had done so. I married in my late 30’s. I wanted to recognize being a part of my husband’s family, so I took his name, but professionally I was known in my field by my maiden name. When people object to personal decisions such as these my first mental reaction is always “What’s it to you?!?”
She should have told that to all the Luxury-Yacht Brits who hyphenate names to make sure all the wealthy (or titled) male ancestors are noted during roll call. ("It's spelled Luxury Yacht, but it's pronounced throatwobbler mangrove" for you Python fans!)
It’s so funny you say that. My husband & I met a British couple while we were all on a cruise & the Brit guy mentioned that we Americans think we are so posh with our hyphenated names. I had had no idea that was the connotation in the UK…maybe I should have chosen “Day Lewis” or “Bonham Carter”, Lol.
"Yes, because we only hyphenate here to feel like a Peer." There's nothing "posh" when your name doesn't fit on a standardized test form.
Several of my married female friends have kids with their birth last names, and nobody died!
Fascinating!!
I had my first child in NYC in 2001. I kept my name, but we planned to give the kid my husband’s last name and told the nurse that. She shrugged. “Mother’s baby, fathers maybe.” And she put my name on every form, and my husband had to get my permission to do anything baby related and honestly it was awesome--it made me feel powerful. We are still together, and I feel like a hetero marriage success overall (after a lot of tinkering) but neither of us will ever forget that nurse.
I've given up trying to understand why, but women changing their names to their husbands does make me irrationally angry. I don't talk about with people anymore bc I know it's a personal choice and I don't want to upset people who are rightly excited about their marriage. I also have never been married, but after a massive break up, feel that I have ex-wife energy, we exist!
Yes! Ex Wife is an energy, a vibe, a spirit of refusal! We can all be ex wives in our hearts
I had so many complicated responses to this. I will say it prompted a lot of thought about my own choice to change my name when I got married. It was not done uncritically, but I think my understanding of the complex reasons (including, it was just easier given all of the structures that support that choice, as well as my fraught emotional history with my family of origin) has deepened over time. And it deepened further listening to this. Thank you.
I did have a strong response to your celebration of Aubrey referring to herself as hot, though, which I'm still parsing out. To be clear, any woman should get to claim that description of herself if she feels its true. And I have to agree with Aubrey, she is super hot so she should absolutely claim that for herself loudly and proudly. But after both of you expressing exasperation about other women not critically examining their choice to change their names when they got married, it was odd to listen to you celebrate her "hotness", as Aubrey is hot in the patriarchally-acceptable way of straight, thin, white women, so uncritically.
Wait... let me acknowledge that you did complicate the notion of hotness to the extent that you talked about feeling after your own divorce like you had to maintain, or achieve, stereotypical hotness so that people would listen to you. That is critique. I guess what I was missing was any explicit discussion about what the definition of "hot" is, and if we're claiming it then we should also be able to do so if we believe it about ourselves, even if we don't fit the patriarchal definition as Aubrey does.
You can't do everything, or hit every perfect point in every conversation. I'm not suggesting you should. And you might not even agree with me, which is also fine. I guess I'm just musing out loud, so to speak.
Thanks for this thoughtful comment! You're right that we could have been more clear. Lyz and I have been friends for a long time and we both have a really inclusive sense of "hotness" being more a state of mind than an ability to follow the rules of the male gaze. Although we've talked about this between us many times, it probably would have helped for us to say that out loud in the recording! (Also, side note, I understand why I read as straight, but I'm actually not.)
Hi, Aubrey! I really appreciate both of your very open-hearted responses to my comment. It gave me a weirdly high level of anxiety to write it, like I was breaking some cardinal rule of always being unfailingly positive in your response to other women writers. It's nice to be able to have real, nuanced conversation.
Also, heard about you not being straight. I shouldn't have assumed, especially as a bi woman who often gets misread because I was married to a man. My apologies.
And I appreciate these thoughts always. Thanks for expressing them. I do think the conversation drifted in a way I wasn’t prepared for which is a joy of these conversations and I agree a definition of hotness would be helpful especially one that pushes back against patriarchal norms.
The birth name debate is fascinating to me because I am marrying into a Hispanic family and tradition in that culture says any kids we have will take both of our last names, no hyphens. But I almost never see that solution mentioned in discussions of children’s lasts names. It’s always “we’d give her both of our names, but we didn’t like the idea of a hyphen.” Friends, hyphens are not necessary! They can simply have both of your names, side by side. Free yourself from the hyphen!
Two aspects of my own name change which were interesting. One, when I told my mom that I was changing my name she got really mad at me, which totally flummoxed me. I responded, "But you changed your name..." To which she declared, quite dramatically, "You never wanted to be one of us anyway!" I'm realizing now that it wasn't that I didn't want to be one of them, it's that in some important ways I wasn't, ever. The family narrative never included the person I actually am and I didn't want to participate in it anymore. I thought by changing my name I was committing to a different, more authentic story. Little did I know then (So young! So naive!) that I was buying into a story about heterosexual marriage and my ex-husband's notions about all sorts of things that weren't my authentic story either. Thank god for divorce.
The other one had to do with my kids. Weeks after I moved out of our house I was walking with them and my oldest (nine at the time) asked me if I was going to change my name since their dad and I weren't married anymore. I was like, Um, we're still married (he'd already introduced them to his girlfriend), and anyway, what would I change it to? He said my maiden name. My response was, I haven't been that person for so long, which felt deeply true. Then we had a great time imagining all of the totally new names that I could choose once the divorce was finalized. I wish I'd done that, in retrospect, but I wanted the same name as my children, and changing their names would have introduced a level of insanity to what was already a bonkers divorce.
I like the idea of turning a stressful moment of a stressful experience - talking with your kids about part of the divorce process - into a fantasy of names. I think on some level, that "normalized" the process. Eh, something like that. Maybe "parents divorcing can't be totally scary because we can joke about mom choosing a new name!"
The 90% stat was way higher than I thought it was! I kept my last name because it’s cool as fuck (and I’m the last of us!). Most of my friends are either not married (ha) or kept their last names. My favorite is a gal pal whose husband took HER last name.
My husband took my last name! So many of my girlfriends love that he did so.
Today's episode is like the 7th consecutive home run for Lyz (and Zach)!
The conversation about names reminded me that if I could do it all over again I'd either encourage my wife to keep her surname or see if we could come up with a new surname for both of us. My thinking on it has evolved significantly but when we were first engaged it was important to me that she take my last name and it was important to her to keep hers. Her reasoning was similar to what Aubrey mentioned in the podcast about carrying on a family name that otherwise won't be passed down. My reasoning was because when I wanted it to be easier for our hypothetical future children, based on my experiences with a mom who changed her surname multiple times.
I had sorted out my feelings about her keeping her name (and about whether it was important to me that she take mine) by the time of our wedding when she surprised me at the reception by announcing that she would be changing her name. The process of doing it ended up being a giant pain in the ass though. No regrets other than wishing we'd taken the opportunity to do something different.
It’s such a hard complicated issue that is so so personal and of course, that’s one of the reasons I wanted to go there. And of course, I also changed my name and I still have that married name. But it’s so hard when everything is pushing you one way to push against it to do something else.
The ex sent an email to the kids recently and cc'd me (he doesn't communicate directly with me anymore, which is a relief). I saw that he used my first name and birth name, and it made me do a little Grinch evil grin and a chuckle. I thought, "Oh, you WISH I'd stop using your name, don't you."
Hahahaha I low key love it!
I got married in 1991 and I remember getting questioned about whether I'd change my name. It seemed such a fraught time for that. Is it still? As it was, I was figuring I would change my name, even though husband's name is lousy (lots of letters, German name with a lousy meaning, etc.) I asked jokingly if he would take my super simple name and no hesitation, he said no, but he didn't care if I didn't take his. But I did because it was a way of signifying outwardly we were a unit. A family, partnership, etc. And down the road, I'm fine with it, but can see that had I not taken it, there would have been ripples of irritation on his family's side.
The funny thing is that on death certificates (in NY at least), the mother and father of the deceased are listed but only the mother's maiden name is listed, regardless of whether she changed her name or not. Nope. Keep it simple for governmental record keeping purposes.
I'm sure genealogists applaud!
When I was married in Western Australia in the early 80s, legally I automatically acquired my husband's surname. If I'd wanted to keep my name, I would have had to change it back by deed poll. WA has never been a socially progressive state.
Half a dozen years later, in Victoria, the form I had to fill in to register my baby's birth (no phone calls here) gave me a range of options, partly because Victoria has always been socially progressive, but also because it reflected the naming conventions of the many cultures that live here. Not that I deviated from the norm, as my then husband made it clear that there was only one option.
I'm still stuck with what I think of as my Slave Name, due to work reasons, but I will be casting it off as soon as I retire.
Another fantastic show and a guest whose works and many good deeds I will eagerly chase down. Thanks to you both.
In the long-ago daze of undergrad meandering, I had some acquaintances who graduated a year or so ahead of me and got married right after. They both changed their names -- "introducing for the first time Missus and Mister Normal" -- and suffice to say it was NOT the style at the time. Despite having hippie families and an upbringing in lefty politics, their entire social circle lost its mind. I can only hope they remained together (or split and kept their married names) to role model the possibilities for a more optimistic next generation? Keep it going, Aubrey. You never know who will live your lesson.
I saw a pair of friends get married in 2017 and they were introduced after the ceremony as "Mr. and Mrs. HisFullName." Not just the last name--his FULL name! Straight out of the 1950s. I was aghast but never said anything because she didn't seem bothered. And, who knows, maybe she wasn't. But if it were my wedding, I would have fought that DJ on the dance floor.
And your REAL friends would have held the DJ down while you kicked some sense into him.
Egad, HisFullName...? I'm not contemporary on rom-coms, but please tell me they've modified the "happy wedding ending" scene this much at least?
I never even thought of changing my name when getting married, and I did not. My husband and I never talked about it either. He says he thought I'd change my name, though he wasn't sure why he thought that way. We hyphenated our kids' last names. Two kids later and my husband said okay I'm done, we are a family and one way to see that is the same last name, so I'll change mine. And he did! And we dropped that name from the last name of the kids as well. He talked to his Dad, my Mom, and my Grandma about it, and my Lakota family was quite happy to have my husband change his name to ours.
When I was a young girl, a family friend combined their last names when they got married. So she went by her last name hypen his last name, and so did he! I remember thinking it was such a fun idea.
This was a fantastic episode. I remember discussing name change with my spouse when we got married, and she let me know what a pain in the butt it was.
The part that hit me right between the eyes when I listened this morning was this:
"I did all the work.
Like, why should he be the first author?"
Whew.
I had to sit down after that.
I like my name and I refuse optional paperwork because I'm LAZY. My youngest has my last name and my eldest has my spouse's last name. I didn't mean to make a choice or have this be some sort of statement. This is either evidence of privilege or that I'm oblivious (why not both!). People have the most fascinating reactions to this and really tell on themselves sometimes. But since I'm dull (which I confidently assert, lol) and basically anonymous, reactions, if they occur, are individualized. At that dose they are really amusing in a way I don't think they would be at Internet scale.
...is this ex-wife energy?