Under no circumstances does he want to carry on his father’s name. He said he either wants to take mine, or change his name to his mother’s maiden name and I can take that. This is also a hot topic at my house… My future husband refuses to keep his last name. I'd love to hear from more men who changed their last names! Feel free to share your story in the comments. In the end, it's about how you identify yourself, in the context of your marriage and your new family. Keep in mind that you're sending a message to the world, and while some people may react negatively to that message, I suspect that if you're considering it in the first place, you probably don't give much stock to those kinds of opinions. Do you value those traditions? If they don't resonate with you, then really, they're not so much traditions as arbitrary rules without reason. What advice would you give to men considering changing their names? Balance out how you feel about the traditions that seem to suggest you should keep your name and leave the changing to her. Our families are both pretty conservative (surprisingly, since we're both such liberal heathens), and my family in particular isn't in love with it (my brother is like, “I guess it's up to me to keep the family name going now”), but honestly, I don't think either of us care much. When we lived in Connecticut, it was less of a big deal than it has been in Texas, but even here, it seems to be less of a big deal than I thought it might be. What responses have you gotten? Responses have been mixed, largely depending on where we are. Woo! Maybe I should change it to Hudson-Rummel and see if they lose me again.) (Also, my student loan people lost me for about three years. At the same time, we wanted to acknowledge our new family with our names, so it just sort of grew out of that, a desire to illustrate our new reality without either of us letting go of the identities that we'd grown up with. Why did you decide to change your name? When we were talking about getting married, Julie expressed hesitation to change her name, and I agreed that really, there was no reason for her to let go of the identity she'd had all her life just because of tradition, particularly one with perhaps some misogynistic origins. Macho cred: Known for cave-mannish confrontational outbursts, watches COPS. It's been five years now and I still have a stack of photocopied documentation of my name change, ready to send in order to prove, yet again, that I am who I am. Government agencies, my work, my insurance company, my credit card company, banks, the car loan agency, anything requiring a credit check … they are not accustomed to men changing their last names. It's been a complete bureaucratic pain in the ass. What advice would you give to men considering changing their names? Don't make the decision lightly. Taking Dawn's last name ended up revealing that a lot of my male friends are more macho and conservative than I would have suspected. They responded with puzzled looks or statements indicating they would never do such a thing. My friends really never knew what to say. I think Dawn's friends see it as nothing surprising because they know her feminist past. What responses have you gotten? It's been weird.
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