To hyphenate last name or not?

There may be a rise in the use of maiden names, but the number of women who take their husband's name when they marry is still overwhelmingly the majority. I find this disheartening. When I got married, I did not stop being a member of the family I grew up in. That family was and is a large chunk of my identity and I wanted to retain that. My husband supported my decision 200% and I've never regretted it. The only time it becomes a pain in the neck is when I have to deal with conservative family members who didn't agree with my decision and persist in sending me birthday/holiday cards and gift checks addressed to me using my married name... and my own father, who is a lawyer, actually told me that when my husband and I bought our house, there would be problems because my last name was different from his. (This turned out not to be true.) It's also annoying when my husband or my child receive correspondence addressed to them using my last name... but every time I have to correct this, I feel that I'm sucking it up and doing my bit to raise consciousness among the lazy, complacent and stubbornly traditional souls who seem to predominate in this world...

When I married my ex-husband, I considered taking his last name or hyphenating, but his last name was so foreign and difficult that I just gave up and kept my maiden name. At the time, I was also rather well known in my industry by my maiden name, and I didn't want the complication of writing my articles under a cobbled-together combination of both last names while transitioning to his last name and then having the complication of how hard it was to make the spelling of his name clear on the phone. No one ever got it right.

It did help a lot when I got divorced seven years later and I didn't have to disentangle any name issues. When I married my current husband, I didn't even consider changing my name. I don't really get making women, and only women, change their names and identities. I can understand why it makes things tricky when you have kids and the different last names are confusing at times, but I think even if we had kids I would have ended up keeping my maiden name.

Meanwhile, we are going through a total nightmare with my husband's name. He was named "Jaime" by his Puerto Rican parents. The hospital in Brooklyn, however, got it wrong, so he is "Jamie" on his birth certificate. When he was eight or so he got tired of being teased for his first name, so he took it on himself to change it to "James." He has been James ever since, at school, on his driver's licenses, on his passport, with Social Security, EVERYTHING.

But when we recently tried to change his NJ license to a CT license, they turned us away because the name on his birth certificate doesn't match the name on his NJ license, or indeed on any other piece of paper that identifies him.

So now we are having to go through the nonsense of a formal name change for him in probate court, so he can lay legal claim to the name that has been his since he was eight. All because of terrorism and identity theft and all the other fun issues that have arisen in the past decade or two.

UGH.

PeggyC said:
When I married my ex-husband...

This is rarely a good idea. ; - )

I took my husband's last name for a few reasons:

1. he really wanted us all to have the same name, whatever it was.
2. he felt very connected to his last name, while mine had lost some bloom off its rose due to my witnessing my dad's parents' treatment of him as we all got older.
3. his last name is super-easy to pronounce and spell, and mine... wasn't. Heh.
4. my full name was utterly unique in the world (seriously!), and I kinda wanted to not be so easily found.

So I took his last name. I was going to use my maiden as 1 of 2 middle names, but the awful Social Security clerk refused to let me have 2 middle names, crossed out my maiden name, and stamped the form. I could've gone back and gotten it changed, but I lived in Brooklyn and I didn't want to wait in 2 hours' worth of lines again. So yeah. That's how I ended up getting the name pattern "First Middle HusbandLastName."

Oh, and I know a couple that married where 1 person had a hyphenated name, and the other person didn't. They ended up taking a few letters from each of their last names and mashing it together into a new last name. So there's one answer to the "what do kids with hyphenated names do when they get married?" question.

Great topic! I can tell you -- from experience -- that there are complications no matter what. For instance, I've kept my maiden name throughout my life. As a result:

1. Each of my kids has a different last name, but neither are my last name

2. My husband's kids have yet another last name, making four last names in our household

3. My husband's ex-wife not only took his name, but chose to keep it after the divorce. So she is the "official" Mrs. X, while I remain Ms. G.

All that said, it's entirely clear to all of us what our relationships are, and anyone who remains confused is welcome to call me Deborah. And I don't think anyone has worried about it for more than five minutes in the past 25 years.

jasper said:

PeggyC said:
When I married my ex-husband...

This is rarely a good idea. ; - )

Hush, you.

LOL.

deborahg said:

All that said, it's entirely clear to all of us what our relationships are, and anyone who remains confused is welcome to call me Deborah. And I don't think anyone has worried about it for more than five minutes in the past 25 years.

I think this is pretty much the bottom line. Do as you wish and it will be fine.

mjh said:

deborahg said:

All that said, it's entirely clear to all of us what our relationships are, and anyone who remains confused is welcome to call me Deborah. And I don't think anyone has worried about it for more than five minutes in the past 25 years.

I think this is pretty much the bottom line. Do as you wish and it will be fine.

Absolutely! As long as you stick to the consistency advice for official accounts/documentation etc., you will be fine whatever you choose.

Forget about what I did when I got married over 20 years ago—after so many years of being Jane Maiden Married on Facebook, I deleted my maiden name and now go by my married last name only.

Legally, when we got married I kept my middle name as opposed to my last name, because my last name on my birth certificate was not the last name I used for most of my childhood. I managed to get a driver's license and a passport with much difficulty. Switching names legally when I got married made my life much easier with regards to legal documentation.

That said, I'd support whatever my girls decide to do if/when they marry.

I considered changing and not changing my name. In the end, I changed it, with the proviso that I used my maiden name as my middle name and generally spell it out rather than just using the initial. It helps that each of my three names has no more than five letters, so the whole thing is still reasonable in length.

I went that way primarily because my mother-in-law was really vehement about the issue and I really didn't want to make waves with her over something that wasn't vitally important to me. (And we get along famously well to this day, so if that made the difference then it was well worth it.) Also, at my particular place of business at the time I married, nearly all of the young women were taking their husbands' names when they married, so there was no strong professional reason to keep my maiden name.

All that being said, changing my name was a colossal hassle and, if it hadn't been for my MIL's preference, I probably would have kept my original name.

If I ever were to divorce or be widowed and subsequently remarry, I think I would be more likely to revert to my maiden name than to change to a new married name.

I will say that, as a sometime amateur genealogist, the lack of consistency in this area does make things harder for those trying to research family history. But the internet (Ancestry.com, etc.) probably more than makes up for that.

That is true, @sac. A genealogist in Dublin is trying to do my family history (we were one of a handful of Irish Jews) and the names are making him insane. Add to this the fact that many immigrants had their names changed on arrival, and it's an unholy mess.

Whatever you do, decided before you go get the marriage licence. When I got mine back in 1993, the couple in front of us had not even discussed whose name they were going to use until the clerk asked them. Turns out they both had different views and then they both changed their minds multiple times. I think it was 1994 before we were able to leave and get married.

nan said:
Whatever you do, decided before you go get the marriage licence. When I got mine back in 1993, the couple in front of us had not even discussed whose name they were going to use until the clerk asked them. Turns out they both had different views and then they both changed their minds multiple times. I think it was 1994 before we were able to leave and get married.

We didn't have to put it on our marriage license application. Ours (not in NJ) only required the current names of the couple, not the married name(s). (Yes, some men change their name after marriage also.)

What state(s) require you to declare this for the license?

@nan: LOL!

New York

I haven't read all of the comments so forgive if redundant, but I used my maiden name as my middle name, no hyphen, and then took my (ex) husband's name as my last name. I also wanted all of us to have the same last name. When I divorced in my early 40's I kept the name the same.

Google tells me that using a maiden name as a middle name is "trendy" right now. Except I don't think it is trendy. My grandmother did that when she got married 75 years ago and she wasn't a trendsetter. I'm guessing it is a traditional option that temporarily fell out of mainstream use and is coming back.

spontaneous said:
Google tells me that using a maiden name as a middle name is "trendy" right now. Except I don't think it is trendy. My grandmother did that when she got married 75 years ago and she wasn't a trendsetter. I'm guessing it is a traditional option that temporarily fell out of mainstream use and is coming back.

Trendy? That's what my mother did 60 years ago. I think it was very common.

I use both my maiden and married name (and actually work under a 3rd name). All are legal according to my marriage license. I recently needed to change my passport from my married name to my maiden name so that it matches with my other identification. I couldn't get the passport people to understand that I didn't have a court order showing my name change since my maiden name was always my name. We are travelling out of the country shortly so this became a real issue. I finally had to get Congressman Payne's office involved and just received my passport which I don't think I would have gotten if not for their diligence! So my advice to you is whatever you do pick one name and go with it!

My mother did the same. So did her mother. All of the monogrammed towels are evidence!

I have a Polish cousin who married another Pole in Germany - he took her last name, where it was offered at the registrar's office as one of five or six choices.

spontaneous said:
Google tells me that using a maiden name as a middle name is "trendy" right now. Except I don't think it is trendy. My grandmother did that when she got married 75 years ago and she wasn't a trendsetter. I'm guessing it is a traditional option that temporarily fell out of mainstream use and is coming back.

I agree - That's what most of my female ancestors did (made some of my genealogy work easier), but when I did it in the 1980s it did not seem so mainstream. It surprised me that, in a time when a growing minority of women were not changing their name at all, the approach of using maiden name as middle name after taking the husband's surname (which seems a compromise) became less common rather than moreso.

My mother also used her maiden name as middle name and took my father's surname. They were married in 1950.

Interesting article on the use of the words "maiden name"

http://www.salon.com/2015/07/06/women_dont_have_maiden_names_a_modest_proposal_to_ditch_the_descriptor_for_good_partner/?source=newsletter

I prefer the phrase "real name." (Although mine is admittedly patrilineal.)

As opposed to a fake name

How about "birth name"?

Please apply tongue-in-cheek emoticon.

I got married 15 years ago and kept my name. I have no regrets. Like the OP, I really like my name. It's not a very common name in the U.S., which I like (even if people mispronounce it all the time).

I just don't understand the need to change a name to become part of my husband's family...HE barely wants to be part of his own family. LOL! I just don't know why marriage means needing to take someone else's name. You already have one.

Honestly, whatever you do is fine, but if you want to keep your name, you should just keep your name. This just shouldn't be an issue in 2015.