Weddingbee Blog

I’m a little sad about changing my last name, but mostly excited. My maiden name is really long and very complicated to pronounce. No one ever gets it right. My married name is very short and incredibly easy to pronounce, so that’s going to be a really nice change. I always said I’d marry someone w/a short last name

I’m not changing my gmail account, even though it uses part of my old last name. I figure ppl can’t figure it out

Heh…my last name starts not only with ‘Z’ but ‘Zu’…there isn’t too much after that. I am just excited to be moving up in the alphabet! Although it will be sad to not be able to walk up to registration tables anymore and say ‘it’s the last one’.

I too am changing my name and feeling a bit of a pain as I consider it further. My new name will contain 4 capitol letters… and my initials will be “LSD” after I move my maiden name to my middle. But, during those times where I wince at the idea of losing my last name… all I have to do is reflect back to all the teasing I got as a child (read: Hey Shepherd, where’s your sheep? or Mmm… Shepherd’s pie! or worse… yes, they get worse), and suddenly I am fine with the new “drug” that will be my last name.

I shifted maiden to middle name, a la “Hilary Rodham Clinton.”

It seems no one can pronounce or spell my new “foreign” last name, but I love it, and changing it was also a gift to my husband. Well, I figure it wasn’t so long ago that my ancestors would have been the new foreigners with names that seemed weird to the “established Americans” whose ancestors’ names must have sounded very weird indeed to the Native Americans. So this commonality makes me next in a long line of trailblazers, cool.

I read somewhere (and man, I do need to find it again soon) that your legal last name and what you’re called don’t necessarily need to be the same. That’s what I’m running with. My legal name (and therefore credit cards, bank accounts, email addresses, passport) will not change, but you can still call me Mrs. Hisname and not be wrong.

Right after we started publicizing the all-encompassing pre-wedding party, a coworker asked me to remind him what my fiance’s last name is. When I told him, he made a face and said, “You don’t look like a [hisname].”

And the most telling thing of all…one day, when this came up on weddingbee before, I sat myself down with pen and paper and decided to sign what my new name would be. I failed. Not like I spelled it wrong or I hesitated or it was awkward or sloppy or anything. I just signed my own full name, the way I always have.

My current last name is pretty easy to pronounce, while my future last name is always mispronounced, and my fiance dealt with a lot of teasing when he was younger. Despite this, I’m actually excited about taking his last name. I see it as a sign of solidarity - I’m proud to be with him, so I’m going to be proud to correct people’s mispellings and mispronounciations… and please remind me of this when I’m sick of correcting people for the 1,000,000th time

I went through those same emotions and took me a long time to get used to my new name. Whenever people (stores and whatnot) ask for my name I’d start saying my maiden name and felt like my brain was shifting. I still have weird moments. I really wanted my new family to have same last name, especially when we have kids. But I also felt like I was being disloyal by changing my last name and was worried what my family would think. In the end I changed my middle name to my maiden name. I still feel sad sometimes because my Korean name was my middle name and now it feels like it was never there. And I always loved that name. My husband was Incredibly Happy when I legally changed to his name though so it was worth it.

I had a difficult childhood, so as much as I love my family, I was very happy to take my husband’s last name and drop my maiden name completely 3 years ago. I felt like I had more freedom to start fresh and not repeat the mistakes my parents had made.
People have always made fun of my maiden name and struggled with my first name, and now I just have difficult-to-pronounce first AND last names that go well together. I don’t feel like I lost part of my identity when I changed my name, I just felt more welcomed into my husband’s family. Because they are all in Asia and we have language and cultural barriers, taking their name created more closeness with them.

I am not changing my last name. Even though we’re not married we’ve already received some mail using just his last name instead of stating us separately. It really bothers me. I think it’s scary to think that you have to give up the identity you’ve had for 25 years to marry someone. My fiance won’t hyphenate his last name and I don’t want us to be announced at our wedding as Mr. & Mrs. Luke G. Where am I in that, just the Mrs. and that’s not enough for me.

Aww..I think that if you are already so emotional (in a good way) about adapting your fiance’s last name as a symbolic transition of creating a family Mr. Eggplant, you should just go with that and the process would be a little smoother. It is pretty hard to let go a part of you (much less something that is your identity!) but think about the family and home that you’re both helping to build!