Offbeat Bride: The best decision I made in my marriage? Keeping my name.

I’m on Offbeat Bride today!

Women keep their name for a variety of reasons. For some, it is a feminist decision that defies patriarchal norms that often come along with becoming a wife. For others, a name can reflect one’s culture; when you have a culturally specific name and your partner does not, giving up that name can feel like giving up your culture, too. For still more women, it’s about working hard to build a career in a culture that uses social media to associate people with their names. This is not a conclusive list, but the decision to keep one’s name — no matter the reason — is an important choice for many women, and one that should not be taken away.

Check out the whole article here!

3 replies on “Offbeat Bride: The best decision I made in my marriage? Keeping my name.”

  1. Good for you! I truly don’t understand the impulse for women to take their husband’s name. Certainly men have no such impulse.

    Although I don’t have statistics, it seems that in Canada women are less likely than they are in the United States to take their husband’s name, or even hyphenate, when they get married. Curiously, I’ve seen more than once in same-sex marriages (equal marriage in the law here), at least those involving women, that one of the partners changes her name.

  2. I’m excited to read the full article! I just wanted to comment here as well.

    Yes, I changed my name upon getting married. However, I did build a fairly strong campaign to convince my husband to be that he should change his last name. But at the end of the day it was more important to me that we share a last name while it was more important to him to “carry on his family legacy.” My solution? I’m planning on getting “Kjeldsen” (the original spelling of my pre-marriage name) tattooed onto my side.

  3. Emilie on

    Great article! I decided to change my name when I got married and, after a year and a half, I have started to use my maiden name again. I originally took my husbands last name because I thought that it was an important part of merging our lives together and creating new traditions. However, once I went through the process of changing everything and started using my new name I began to feel like I had lost a part of me. Also, before I got married I was in grad school and I published some work and spoke at a few conferences. Recently, I’ve been trying to get a job in the field that I studied and I have realized how important my name is in my career too. So, I have decided, at least for now, to use both names. I’m not hyphenating them, but instead using both names behind my first name. At some point I might drop my husbands name, but for now I am using it because it is my “legal” name and I really don’t want to go through the process of changing my name back again. Also, I do like his name. In fact, his last name and my last name are the same, except mine is in French and his is in English. At first I didn’t want to use both last names because I thought it was redundant, but after a while I decided not to care about that. It is much more important for me to feel comfortable with my name and my identity that is wrapped up in it.