Would you give up your name?

[Psychoninja7]

I probably wouldn't take my spouse's name. I just don't see the point in it.

 

[Supertegwyn]

Depends who has the better name.

I like my last name though, but I won't push.

 

[Kuilui]

Seeing as how I am the only child in the family and so its entirely on me to carry on the family name, I'm going to go with no. It would kill my family if I gave up my last name. If I was a girl they'd probably be cool with it but since I'm not I have no excuse.

 

[manic_depressive13]

I don't feel any attachment to my name. I "changed" my first name between primary school and high school. Everyone including my family used to refer to me by my middle name. I didn't even realise it wasn't my first name until I went to high school and everyone started calling my by the name on the roll, despite my parents having specified that my middle name was my prefered name. Rather than having to correct every single one of my teachers, I decided to just go with it and, hey presto, I suddenly had a new name.

If I can get used to that I don't see why I would care about changing my surname. Surnames are rarely articulated anyway.

 

[Bertylicious]

It depends on her name and how long i think the marriage will last.

But i kinda like my name its really scandinavian, though i dont think anyone beyond scandinavia can pronounce "Juul" correctly. But "Petersen" is quite easy to pronounce, i think.

"How long I think the marriage will last"!? Jesus Christ dude!

 

[mionic]

Same as it seems many here.
I would not give up my name, not that I have much of a family pride or anything, but I'm used to it, and it pleases me. It's also relatively unique, and I like that.
Neither would I expect my special other to take mine.

 

[likalaruku]

I say you just take whomever's last name sounds cooler. A last name has so little value to me, that it baffles me that the Japanese refer to eachother by them. I went to schools with tons of people who had the same first & last names but weren't related. Nicknames were the only ones we gave value to.

 

[Samantha Burt]

AB-SO-LUTELY. I hate my surname. I'm engaged right now, and I cannot stress enough how glad I'll be to get rid of the horrid surname you see to your left.

 

[BathorysGraveland]

Well I think marriage is silly, so this isn't really an issue for me. But to answer the question generally, no I wouldn't give up my name. While there are others I prefer, I do take pride in my name, as I would expect any self-respecting person to.

 

[justnotcricket]

As a woman, I don't think I would, as there is only my sister and I left in the family to carry on our last name. No one else has it anymore, and I would feel terrible letting it die out. It's not too common of a name.

Also, these days, your name is everywhere - it's not easy career-wise to change you name especially when you have a lot of contacts and such. The amount of legwork you have to do to inform everyone just strikes me as way too difficult.

Plus all those extra fees to update everything else with a name-change. Not worth it.

...actually, you pretty much summed up everything I would have had to say here! =D I'm in exactly the same boat, down to the sister thing and everything...

Mind you, your comment about 'dying out' - I've thought about that myself, but the problem you run into is then: OK, so you have kept your name and had some children - whose name do they take? Do you have two and give one to each? Cos that's gonna get confusing... what if your husband is also the last in his family? So many permutations...

I suppose it kind of depends how attached you are to your last name. I have to admit, if I had a difficult/unpleasant surname, I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to changing it when I married, especially if my partner had a much nicer one! I'm not in that situation, however, so I suppose I'm talking through my hat a bit there. ;-)

 

[Rossmallo]

Yeah, even if I was a chick, I would refuse to lose "Mallinson".

I mean cmon, unique surname or what?

 

[Grey Day for Elcia]

If my circumstances were different, I would've, sure. I already had a body of work under my maiden name when I got married, and I would've lost a lot of professional traction if I changed it. I changed my name the first time I got married, and it was hell to get it back when I got divorced. (You'd think it would be the other way around.)

It actually causes a bit of trouble that my husband and I don't share a last name. It just confuses people; I'll call, say, the bank to talk about our account, and they'll be like "um, can you prove you're really his wife?"

You could always just not get married.

OT: I couldn't physically care any less about my name. So, sure.

 

[Creator002]

If I was a female getting married to a male, I'd probably change it, just as it seems to be the norm. If I get married and my wife didn't want to change her last name, then so be it. I don't care.
As for me taking on my wife's name, or adding her name to my last, probably not. My name is already a hyphenation of my grandparents' last names. It'd just be messy to muck around with it a bit more and I like my last name. It's truly unique, seeing that only 10 or so people in the world have it. *smug*

 

[Snowbell]

My name isn't important to me all that much since I don't like it all that much. Later this year I'll be using deedpoll to get rid of my last name and replace it with my middle name.

When it comes to marriage, I will take/keep whoever's last name is nicer.

 

[Sexy Devil]

There aren't a lot of things a guy can say to really support the notion other than it's just tradition. However, it's kind of important to have one name per family unit. I'm not going to have children who do not bare my name, and I will not have children who do not bare the name of their mother either. "Hello Mrs. Findley, I see you're here to pick up Wesley Senger, are you his legal guardian?"

Merging names is also a stupid concept that I wish would go away. Ok, so you want my children to be named Senger-Whatever, it looks dumb on paper already, and what do you expect them to do when they get married? Are we going to have a bunch of Senger-Whatever-Yadda-Yaddas grandchildren running around? It's a retarded concept, and if it really caught on, we would have names that take up an entire paragraph. Unless of course somebody opted to just sacrifice their name or something, that would work, and it does work.

One name per family, it works, it makes sense, let's keep it that way. The way I see it, it's a conflict that is bound to come up, who will give up their name, well the tradition is easy to follow and eliminates that problem. Oh, and when I said I didn't have anything to say to back up the tradition, I didn't say I had nothing to say. The man is the head of the family, there is no disputing this. It's a biological gender role, women take care of the children, men hold the fort. You don't see men taking paternity leave while the mothers go to work and feed the family. We are the head of the family, the family is in our name.

Actually, men take paternity leave sometimes. Paternity leave exists, it's a thing, you just don't see it much because of a few thousand years of gender stereotypes.

 

[Susan Arendt]

If my circumstances were different, I would've, sure. I already had a body of work under my maiden name when I got married, and I would've lost a lot of professional traction if I changed it. I changed my name the first time I got married, and it was hell to get it back when I got divorced. (You'd think it would be the other way around.)

It actually causes a bit of trouble that my husband and I don't share a last name. It just confuses people; I'll call, say, the bank to talk about our account, and they'll be like "um, can you prove you're really his wife?"

You could always just not get married.

OT: I couldn't physically care any less about my name. So, sure.

Well, sure, but I wanted to. I love being married.

 

[Grey Day for Elcia]

If my circumstances were different, I would've, sure. I already had a body of work under my maiden name when I got married, and I would've lost a lot of professional traction if I changed it. I changed my name the first time I got married, and it was hell to get it back when I got divorced. (You'd think it would be the other way around.)

It actually causes a bit of trouble that my husband and I don't share a last name. It just confuses people; I'll call, say, the bank to talk about our account, and they'll be like "um, can you prove you're really his wife?"

You could always just not get married.

OT: I couldn't physically care any less about my name. So, sure.

Well, sure, but I wanted to. I love being married.

A married woman enjoying marriage? MADNESS!

Could I ask why you like being married? Just out of curiosity. Like, not being a couple or anything, but specifically being married.

I've never cared for it and I don't really get it.

 

[J-meMalone]

I wouldn't want to change my name, I like mine. But I also wouldn't expect my spouse to change their's unless they wanted to.

 

[AngloDoom]

I'd happily give up my last name - it's quite dull. I've actually been wanting to change it for years to something short and sweet as a way of making my very dull forename seem a little more interesting, but I'd feel like that's a kick in my family's teeth if I did that.

 

[Susan Arendt]

If my circumstances were different, I would've, sure. I already had a body of work under my maiden name when I got married, and I would've lost a lot of professional traction if I changed it. I changed my name the first time I got married, and it was hell to get it back when I got divorced. (You'd think it would be the other way around.)

It actually causes a bit of trouble that my husband and I don't share a last name. It just confuses people; I'll call, say, the bank to talk about our account, and they'll be like "um, can you prove you're really his wife?"

You could always just not get married.

OT: I couldn't physically care any less about my name. So, sure.

Well, sure, but I wanted to. I love being married.

A married woman enjoying marriage? MADNESS!

Could I ask why you like being married? Just out of curiosity. Like, not being a couple or anything, but specifically being married.

I've never cared for it and I don't really get it.

Well, it depends on what it means to you personally (and your spouse, of course). I like the feeling of permanence, that someone cares enough about me to want to stick around in such a declarative fashion. Marriage isn't a universal truth, or anything - it means different things to different people.