Weddingbee Blog

When I was a kid in 6th grade, I used to play the M.A.S.H. game (Mansion-Apartment-Shack-House) with the best of ’em. We’d giggle over crushes, bemoan our poor luck in seemingly always pulling Shack, and be terrified at the thought of having 24 children (still am!). I was guilty of trying out my first name with boys’ last names, and sometimes even doodling them in notebooks to ’test it out’.

This fascination though, only lasted until high school when I really started thinking about what changing my name would mean. College did nothing but confirm that I was uncomfortable with the tradition of women dropping their last names to take their husband’s name.

After Mr. Guinea Pig and I got engaged, I was giving my phone number to one of his friends when she said, “Shoot, what’s your last name? Nevermind, I’ll just go ahead and put you in as {my first name, Mr. Guinea Pig’s last name} - how exciting!”

Um, exciting?

That’s not quite what I was thinking. More along the lines of, ‘oh crap, you just assumed I’m changing my name, and I’m kind of angry about that right now but I can’t say anything because everyone’s smiling at me and making “awww” noises.’ When I talked to Mr. GP about this later, he got quiet and asked, “You’re not changing your name?” Cue the doom music.

It turns out, Mr. GP has fairly strong feelings about this - and they are the opposite of what I expected, I’ll be honest. Mr. Guinea Pig really wants me to change my name. Enough so that he asked me to change it despite having just heard that I did not want to.

At first, I was horrified. For every one of his reasons for me to change my name I countered with what I thought was a better reason not to. Including the fact that as a scientist, my name is pretty much my career - every paper I publish is linked to my name (obviously). In addition to this, there is a lot of pressure from colleagues and even expectations from my advisor that changing my name would mean I’m not a strong female/feminist scientist. Ugh. I hate this expectation just as much as the belief that a woman should change her name, maybe even more, because isn’t feminism about giving women a choice?! (Thank you Miss Pencils!)

One of my main reasons though, was that my mom, dad, sister and I are pretty tight and my name ties me to them. Mr. Guinea Pig took this argument to mean that I would rather stay associated with my parents & sister for the rest of my life than change my name and be associated with him after marrying him. Huh. I hadn’t thought of that. In fact, in particular it associates me with my dad, whose last name we all have. In being all ’no taking the man’s name!’, I never considered that keeping my last name is just clinging to another man’s (my father’s) last name (not that I don’t love you, dad).

Mr. Guinea Pig’s argument is that he wants us to be a family, united by one last name - especially if we have kids. I said if it was just having one last name he was worried about, he could go ahead and change his last name to mine! That didn’t convince him. Another option I tried was combining our last names (I am completely opposed to hyphenating for some reason), which could be done to hilarious effect. As we both have Irish last names, it would be possible to combine them into a sort-of-funny-but-not-unreasonable new Irish sounding name.

However, Mr. Guinea Pig is unwilling to change his name because he’s a “Jr” - if he changes his name, he’s no longer a “Jr” as he wouldn’t have the same name as his father anymore.

All this to say, I have no idea what I’m doing. No matter what, I will be disappointing someone, and it’s hard to make a decision with that kind of pressure. Especially when I’m not even sure what I want anymore. Mr. Guinea Pig has repeated many times that although he wants me to change my name, it is my decision to make (duh, it’s my name!) and he’ll obviously love me no matter what I decide. One option I’m considering is to keep my maiden name in science while using his name socially (people assume this anyway). If I did this I’d want to have both names legally be my last name, I think. Maybe we should use Mrs. D’orsay’s method and play Rock Paper Scissors to choose?!

Did you add your husband’s last name to your last name (with no hyphen)?  What are your reasons for changing/not changing your name? Do you hate hearing people waffle about this decision?