Reasonably often though, Im addressed as Mrs (partners surname)

Because so much is in my partner’s name I am reasonably regularly addressed as Mr (partner’s surname). It comes in handy with telemarketers; they address me so, I reply ‘kind of’ and already they are on the back foot.

I love the Icelandic naming system so much that it makes me want to go and live there. Everyone in a family gets different names and nobody’s name changes on marriage. Instead of being Laura Carroll I’d be Laura Annesdottir, formally known as Laura. Brilliant.

…giving children their fathers name is a public acknowledgement of his fatherhood. I know Im their mother without having to have the same name as them.

Good point.

My two daughters have my husband’s name – it is certainly easier to spell and pronounce than mine, but I also feel that giving children their father’s name is a public acknowledgement of his fatherhood. I know I’m their mother without having to have the same name as them.

I didn’t have children until the 1980s and 90s, but I have never found any real problems with dealing with school and other bureaucratic institutions under different names – I’ve always made sure their dad does a fair bit of that stuff anyway. These days with so many blended families around, lots of kids have even more complicated sets of parental and quasi-parental names to deal with.

My older daughter has recently married along with a couple of her best friends – she didn’t change her name (the combination of her first name with her partner’s surname would have been pretty dreadful), but at least one of her friends has.

And on the husband changing his name issue – I know a person with the surname Dick. He recently married and expressed a desire to change his surname to his new wife’s – he really had had enough of the puerile jokes. However, because his wife was from an Indonesian family with a proud tradition the father in law refused to allow it – he now uses his second name as his surname.

Personally, I couldn’t wait to adopt hubby’s surname, as my maiden name was a bit complicated to spell. I often joke that I looked everywhere for a Smith or a Jones, but had to settle for a Hart.

The symbolism of a woman changing her name to her husband’s is an emergent property of the identification system and now the convenience factor is reduced and even becomes inconvenient so we will see less changing of names but an increase in the symbolic strength of the action when a change occurs.

I doubt very much if your next husband will want you to take on any name you don’t want to take on. But I guess it’s possible. No sign of that kind of sentiment on this thread anyway.

So I thought, this is ridiculous. What if I ever wanted to marry again? (Yep, weirdly, I still believe in marriage – for myself – it’s an individual thing.) Do I really change my name depending on what man I happen to be with at the time?

Our names identify us, and probably naturally I identify with my maiden name more than my subsequent 2 names. So as soon as I knew my second marriage was ending, I reverted to my maiden name because I was gaining a professional reputation under my married name. Messy, awkward, but I’m happy with that decision and a year later things are pretty smooth.

Should I marry again, I will definitely keep my maiden name as a professional name. Whether or not I take on my husband’s surname would depend largely on how important that is to him. I’d prefer to keep my maiden name but in relationships I don’t think there are many things that should be engraved in stone, and for me that’s not one. It’s ultimately about what works best for the people involved.

The first interstate move I compromised to double barrel-dom with my surname first and then his.

But he was and is a complete traditionalist and the subtle pressure combined with a career change and two moves later to a country town that couldnot/would not cope with my ethnic name meant I changed to his easy Anglo name.And it begins with “A” so I begin the professional lists. Yes, I can justify it as convenience. Yes, it still bothers me but it bothers me less than it would bother him, especially now we have children.

…

Actually, that’d be kind of amusing, in a lowbrow, confusion-causing kind of way; I wonder if I can convince them to go for it.

When I married (1987) Denise kept her maiden name, but the kids took my name. Denise comes from the high water mark period of feminism, thats another trend issue, and will not in fact answer to Mrs Belshaw. This sometimes caused minor ripples with my older relatives. The school handled the issue by addressing all letters to both of us with individual names.

With my daughters, 20, 18, I do not know what they might do.I do have the strong impression looking across those under thirty that there has been a reversion back to married names, but for different reasons than in the past. I also think that its now seen as a matter of individual choice. But both are just impressions.

One solution to this problem is that daughters take their mother’s last name, and boys their father’s. It does mean that male and female siblings have different surnames, but there are no perfect solutions to this problem.

I went to school with someone who I ran into years later and who had taken his wife’s name.

Perhaps he didn’t like his previous name (Cox). He’d taken the name Balabanski. But I didn’t ever ask him.

PC – commiserations. An outrage. Thanks for the story.

None of the people I dealt with while I was trying to sort this out could get their heads around the idea that a woman might not be thrilled and proud to tell the world she was married, by taking her husband’s name and calling herself Mrs. Some of the older men I dealt with on phones and across desks were openly disapproving.

I ran out of energy to fight this in the end, and decided that ‘liberation’ didn’t mean endless bureaucratic struggles, so gave in and was officially known for several years by my husband’s surname. When the marriage ended several years later I had to actually change my name by deed poll in order to get my own birth surname back. Which I did faster than you can say ‘decree absolute’.

Has there ever been a case of man taking on his wife’s family name I wonder? And what would that imply?