Weddingbee Blog

Originally published on November 12, 2009

Mrs. Spaniel nominated Mrs. Rainbow’s name change post. Mrs. Spaniel says, “I know that everyone has a post about name changing, but the one that really impacted me was Mrs. Rainbow’s post, where she told us that both she and her fiance decided to take both of their names. I’m not joking; it sparked the conversation where Mr. Spaniel and I actually decided to each take my birth name as a second middle name.

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Let me just start of by saying that I am so lucky to be marrying such an understanding, compassionate, and laid back man.

I say this because I initially had absolutely no desire to change my name, ever. Even as a little girl, I couldn’t imagine having anyone else’s last name but my own. I quite like my last name, it meshes well with my identity. It’s a strong—yet pretty and proper sounding—British name. It’s one of those names that goes well with everything, but isn’t super common, like Smith or Jones.

To be honest, I was a bit nervous about telling Mr. Rainbow that I was planning on keeping my last name. Most men (like my dad, for example) are so against the idea of their wife not having the same last name. When I broke the news to Mr. Rainbow, his response was something to the tune of: “Really? Okay, if that’s what you want sweetie, whatever makes you happy.” Gosh, I love that man. What potentially could have caused a huge fight between many other couples, was not even a ripple on our radar.

Fast-forward a few weeks later and the gears in my brain started spinning: “What if we decide to have kids? Whose name will they have? I don’t want to be the only one in the family with a different last name!”

I came to the conclusion that I just wouldn’t feel like we’re a family if we didn’t have the same last name. I knew I didn’t want to toss out my last name and just assume his, as if I had acquired someone else’s identity. I still wanted to be me.

For a while I thought, maybe I’ll just hyphenate, but I really wanted to pass my last name onto our maybe children, as well. My step-mom suggested using my last name as a middle name, but to me, that wasn’t good enough. Why should Mr. R’s family name get the big prominent last name spot, while my family name is just pushed onto the “middle name back burner”? It just didn’t sound fair to me—traditional, sure—but not fair. Our respective families contributed equally to creating us, and I want to honor them as such.

In the movie of our life, our family names should both get top billing. His is not more important than mine, nor is mine more important than his. I am not the no-name actor to Mr. Rainbow’s George Clooney. We are equals in this relationship, and our names should reflect that. And now… drum roll please… they will!

Mr. Rainbow and I will both be hyphenating and I am so excited about it! We will be Mr. and Mrs. mylastname-hislastname. Here’s another interesting piece of info: Mr. R and I both have two middle names, which means we’ll both have five names post wedding! Nuts, huh? We’ll both be firstname middlename middlename mylastname-hislastname. Holy poo, that’s a lot of names! Also, our maybe someday children will also have a hyphenated last name (but only one middle name… are you following?), which they will probably hate us for, but they’ll live. It works for us, and I am sooo excited about our decision.

I’m curious, would your SO be willing to take your name and add it to his own? Are you and your fiance doing any unorthodox name changing?

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