Getting married in a month and I can't decide if I want to take his last name

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I did not change. Feel really dated to me. So many people do not change now that it is no big deal. My name seems like it is part of me and should not change. Also DH's name is very different ethnically than mine and I wanted to keep my link.

You can always wait and decide later.

+1 to all this. I won't call it anti-feminist, but it does seem like an incredibly dated notion to me.

My kids have DH's last name. They are teens; it's never been a problem.

[Anonymous]

My kids have my last name for kind of complicated family politics reasons, even though my husband is their biological father and we're happily married.

We've never regretted it, even though everyone said it would be confusing. It has literally never been an issue with registration, international travel, or anything else.

[Anonymous]

My kids have a hyphenated name. My husband has his name. I have mine. We haven't had a single problem - ok wait a few computer systems don't recognize the hyphen.

Unlike one PP, we did not have to produce a marriage certificate to refinance - nor have I had to produce one to put him on my health insurance.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I don't understand how keeping your name is feminist but handing your husbands name (only) to the children you carried then happens.

I kept my name and my kids have my DH's last name. I agree with you, and it was a difficult decision for me 20 years ago when my first child was born. At that time I didn't want to hyphenate (I thought it would be a pain), so we had to choose one or the other. There wasn't any real reason to prioritize one of our names over the other, and it definitely was ''easier" to give them DH's last name (in terms of dealing with the ILs). So we gave DC1 my last name as a middle name and DH's last name as a surname, and did the same with our subsequent children.

If I were doing it today, I'd hyphenate. My kids go/went to a high school with a large Hispanic population, so hyphenated names are very common.

[Anonymous]

I changed mine, mostly because I didn't like my original last name and wanted the same name as my kids.

That said, 8 years and two kids later, I still accidentally introduce myself with my maiden name at least a quarter of the time. So I probably shouldn't have changed it

[Anonymous]

I changed it and regret it. I try to use both names professionally (like HRC before she dropped the R) and find it just confuses people. Plus my old name sounded cooler. I'm also not sure if it has hurt my career - one interviewer for a job I didn't get said it was "brave" of me to change my name, and usually when people say stuff like that they mean "dumb and risky."

I agonized over it and I think in the excitement of being newlywed I wanted to make a symbolic change, but in retrospect I wish I'd waited 6 months.

[Anonymous]

It is a personal preference.

I use Jane Smith Taylor because I was older when I got married and was known as Jane Smith in my profession so I didn't want to lose that name.

Plus I like Smith better than Taylor...

Sometimes I wish I had just stayed Jane Smith.

Mostly, I am happy with my choice.

Of my siblings, two kept maiden names and one sister in law took our family name and other sister in law kept her name.

[Anonymous]

you can do it at any time, really. I waited 3 years before I changed mine. After traveling as a family, it felt odd to have different last names. So I changed it. It wasn't very hard, and no one seemed to blink an eye.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I kept my name. It's a quirk of American culture to have women change their name upon marriage and I hope that my daughters don't do adopt this tradition. I agree with you that it is archaic and un-feminist.

What about my kids? Officially, they have DH's last name and my last name as a middle name. This makes it really easy to show their connection to both parents.

Fun sidenote, in my culture there is no such thing as a middle name - the child can have multiple given names and/or surnames. So for example on my DC's passport my last name is listed as a surname along with DH's last name. I like this tradition much better than erasing the mom's name completely as is the custom in the U.S. For practical purposes in my country, we also just use the last surname in everyday communication for example: DC would still be Mr. or Ms. (DH's last name.) Still, it's considered important for the children to have the mom's name to honor both sides of their family tree.

This.

I really don't understand why more families don't do this. I also kept my last name and my children have my last name as a middle and husband's last name as their last name. I think that it's archaic for women to change their names upon marriage and I'm American!

[Anonymous]

Yes - I had lived in Spain in the 90s; it was more traditional then but women kept their names.

It seemed like a no-brainer to me to keep mine. That's me.

Your choice.

[Anonymous]

I kept my name and my kids have my DH's last name. I agree with you, and it was a difficult decision for me 20 years ago when my first child was born. At that time I didn't want to hyphenate (I thought it would be a pain), so we had to choose one or the other. There wasn't any real reason to prioritize one of our names over the other, and it definitely was ''easier" to give them DH's last name (in terms of dealing with the ILs). So we gave DC1 my last name as a middle name and DH's last name as a surname, and did the same with our subsequent children.

If I were doing it today, I'd hyphenate. My kids go/went to a high school with a large Hispanic population, so hyphenated names are very common.

This sums up my situation. I never wanted to change my name, and I have never had any problems with refinancing, house buying or anything else like that. Nobody has ever questioned whether my kids were mine, either.

[Anonymous]

I kept mine and our kids now have a hyphenated last name. What I don't understand are women who keep theirs and then give the children his. So tradition is okay for the kids (and all that that symbolism implies about second-class status of women) but not for the wife. That feels antiquated, too. I mean, you do all the work and then they get his name? Why? I don't get it. I know hyphenating can be cumbersome, but isn't it weird for everyone in the family to have the same name BUT you?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I changed it and it's fine. I like that our family shares the same name - I wouldn't want to have a different name than my kids.

I use my maiden name as a middle name on social media and LinkedIn, so hopefully people can find me fairly easily still, but in everyday life I just use my married name.

Same here. It was also easy because I didn't have a middle name to start with. I like finally having three initials.

[Anonymous]

Yes unless you want to have to explain every pickup

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I kept mine and our kids now have a hyphenated last name. What I don't understand are women who keep theirs and then give the children his. So tradition is okay for the kids (and all that that symbolism implies about second-class status of women) but not for the wife. That feels antiquated, too. I mean, you do all the work and then they get his name? Why? I don't get it. I know hyphenating can be cumbersome, but isn't it weird for everyone in the family to have the same name BUT you?

I kept my maiden name, but it is difficult to spell and pronounce, though I personally love it because it is a reflection of my heritage. I just didn't want my kids to deal with spending their lives spelling/correcting pronunciation of their last name, so I gave them DH's, which is easy to spell and which no one mispronounces. Purely practical reason - not some sudden throwback to tradition.

I also had more of a say in the first and middle names of the kids, and each child has at least one name from my family. Seemed like a win-win to me.