Anonymous wrote:A woman can call herself whatever she likes, but I would never agree to hyphenating my children's names. On both practical and aesthetic levels, it's obnoxious.

I'm sure no one says that to your face, but they are thinking it, trust me.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Saw no reason to change my name but would have changed it had my DH wanted to change his to a hyphenated/different name. Our kids have hyphenated names with mine coming first. We've been married 18 years and our oldest is 15. We've never had a problem with travel, hospitals (even overseas) or schools. In this day and age with so many blended families with differing names, I'm surprised anyone would use 'to avoid hassle' as a reason to change their names.

What if your daughter marries someone with a hyphenated name? Will she have four last names? Which one will she drop? The probelm is that eventually someone has to drop a name! Or everyone will eventually have 100 last names.

MrUnreal wrote:My wife took my name and I am glad she did. I did not require it, my wife wanted to. She is a very strong independent woman and I don't think it really mattered to either of us. However, I will state that I am the only male left and if I did not continue my family name (German heritage) it would likely die with me and for that reason I am glad she decided to take my name. We never had a discussion or anything.

PP, maybe because it is important to one person or they don't mind either way.

Honestly, if sitting a day at the DMV is the biggest of your worries then who gives a care. It doesn't seem like all that much effort to me and I don't see why you would be so biased against taking your husband's last name. If tradition was that I take my wife's last name and I wasn't morally opposed to it for whatever reason, then I would've changed it. [/b]It sounds like a non-issue to me [/b] and not sure why there has to be a debate about it (other than the feminist belief in displacing any tradition seemingly in any male's favor).

Anonymous wrote:Saw no reason to change my name but would have changed it had my DH wanted to change his to a hyphenated/different name. Our kids have hyphenated names with mine coming first. We've been married 18 years and our oldest is 15. We've never had a problem with travel, hospitals (even overseas) or schools. In this day and age with so many blended families with differing names, I'm surprised anyone would use 'to avoid hassle' as a reason to change their names.

Anonymous wrote:I hate how women come up with all these reasons to justify keeping their own name, when there's really only one: self-respect.

Anonymous wrote:No. I have my degrees and professional licenses in my name, and I didn't want the hassle of changing everything, but more importantly, my name is just....my name. I don't think of it as "my father's name" (my husband is a III, so he literally has his father's name), I think of it as my name. My husband said he always thought it was kind of weird that women changed their names at marriage. He has lots of friends from various countries (including the US) who didn't.

Our child has his last name (I chose the first and middle names, and the middle name is a family name on my mom's side). It has caused zero problems. We are just the Smith-Jones family.

Anonymous wrote:I'll bet most of you who didn't take your husband's name still took an engagement ring. Overcoming sexist traditions can't be taken too far, you know.