Re:Why don't more men take their wife's surname when they ma...
by bradknowles on Tuesday July 31, 2018 @02:18AM
(#17650951)
My wife and I have been married for almost 20 years. But she has never taken my last name.
When we were engaged, I learned that she wasn’t planning on taking my last name, and the thought didn’t really bother me —- I felt it was her choice to do as she wished in that regard, and it wouldn’t change the fact that we were married.
As it turned out, she already had a number of years of experience as a lawyer with her existing name, and there would have been a reputational cost to the change, so she just wanted to keep her name. Makes total sense to me!
Since then, I’ve been called “Mr. Geyer” more than a few times, and I’m kind of used to it by now —- maybe about as much as women get called Mrs. Husband-name, when they didn’t actually change theirs.
Household-wise, we are the “Geyer-Knowles Family”, by dint of alphabetical sorting. We don’t have children, but if we did, then they might have a hyphenated last name.
Now, I do have a male friend who changed his last name to match that of his wife after they got married, and the story I heard was that he never liked his last name. So that totally made sense.
When we were engaged, I learned that she wasn’t planning on taking my last name, and the thought didn’t really bother me —- I felt it was her choice to do as she wished in that regard, and it wouldn’t change the fact that we were married.
As it turned out, she already had a number of years of experience as a lawyer with her existing name, and there would have been a reputational cost to the change, so she just wanted to keep her name. Makes total sense to me!
Since then, I’ve been called “Mr. Geyer” more than a few times, and I’m kind of used to it by now —- maybe about as much as women get called Mrs. Husband-name, when they didn’t actually change theirs.
Household-wise, we are the “Geyer-Knowles Family”, by dint of alphabetical sorting. We don’t have children, but if we did, then they might have a hyphenated last name.
Now, I do have a male friend who changed his last name to match that of his wife after they got married, and the story I heard was that he never liked his last name. So that totally made sense.