I’m getting married in August. My fiancé and I have been together for almost 7 years. We have grown into adults with meaningful careers together since we met at 18.
Now that we are planning our wedding, we often speak about which traditions apply to us. We have open conversations about it, and we ditched many things that most couples do in their wedding (e.g. I won’t have my dad walk me down the aisle, we won’t have a wedding cake, we won’t stay apart until the day and he can see me in my dress before the wedding). On the other hand, we still do some traditional things (e.g. a Christian ceremony).
So what about the name?
His name is okay, my name is okay. We both think that hyphenating ultimately doesn’t make sense, since, in Germany, children can only have one name. So we have to pick a family name anyway. And that’s where the trouble begins.
If I ask my fiancé to take my name, he’ll agree. If it is important to me, he’ll let me have it. But I also know that it means that he’d have to give something up. We are in exactly the same situation here. And now, we are feeling pressure from society.
He might face social stigma when he gives up his name in favor of mine. Studies have shown that that is still an issue, and I’ve seen it with a few guys in my company who have taken their wife’s name. On the other hand, if I take his name, I’ll feel like a bad feminist.Yael Wolfe wrote an article that criticized the fact that so many women still take their partner’s name. I am a woman with a thriving career in tech. I consider myself a feminist, and I’m aware that what other women do influences us. It teaches us a norm. I don’t want to be part of an old antiquated norm.
But the whole point of the debate is that we can now make this decision freely. We should pick the name that makes the most sense. In our case, it arguably is my fiancé’s name. He is a lawyer and is most often referred to by his surname, I am a software engineer, where everyone is going on a first-name basis anyway (which is why an above-average amount of colleagues have taken their wife’s names). So the logical thing would be to take his name. It is a much larger part of his identity than my name is of mine. Why do I feel guilty about it?
Because I am made to feel guilty. One regrettable side of feminism is that with new norms there comes new social pressure. You have to pick a side. You have to choose: Are you a feminist? Don’t work part-time then! Don’t take your husband’s name! Don’t even get married, because marriage disproportionately benefits men! You still do that? You’re a bad feminist then.
Ultimately, I am going to take his name. If I kept mine, I’d be doing it for the wrong reasons. This way, I’ll contribute to the debate in a nuanced way.
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This post was previously published on medium.com.
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Photo credit: Micheile Henderson on Unsplash