There are cultures with very different naming practices. And it still works.
Also, I guarantee you most Americans don’t have the same, including spelling, last name as their ancestors.
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This
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Both my DILs took our last name. Their email addresses still have their maiden names. I was happy to get rid of my awful maiden name. Happy that my DH’s last name is an easy one.
Pete Buttigieg and his husband share the same last name.
I’m happy that taking your husband’s last name, not taking it or changing the name is all good.
Just like marriage, there are many ways to do it.
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I love this.
We have friends who always send us mail addressed to “The MyLastName HisLastName Family” even though I did change my last name to HisLastName. So kind of the opposite situation.
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Somehow, they make it work in Spanish speaking places, where it is common for wife, husband, and their kids to have different surnames.
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Seems like some of the issues regarding wives taking their husbands’ surnames or not have to do with an even stronger tradition that is just assumed and unquestioned, which is that the kids of a married wife and husband take the husband’s surname, resulting in the continuation of the male lineage surname and the disappearance of the female lineage surname. (The Spanish two surname tradition, when used, delays the disappearance of the female lineage surname by a generation, but the female lineage surnames still disappear while the male lineage surnames continue.)
I don’t know if it’s because she has to show she is under 2 as a lap baby. My daughter said has had to show it in Sacramento airport every time but the other two airports no one asked.
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That could be it – it could be more about verifying that the child still qualifies as a lap baby and nothing to do with last names.
One of my DILs has a doctorate. At S1 and DIL’s wedding, my sister asked DIL if she was going to be Mrs. HerLastName or Mrs. HisLastName. DIL responded, I’m going to be DOCTOR HerLastName.
Oooooooookay.
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Good for Dr. HerLastName. 
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I was married almost 50 years ago and never thought of not changing my last name. D changed to her H’s name and kept her maiden name as middle name. DIL, a physician,chose my son’s last name and completed all the bureacratic paperwork.
My husband’s brother and sister both live in the same large city, just blocks apart. Dh’s sister never married. His brother is married and his wife took not only took his name, but dropped her maiden name, not using it as a new middle name like many women do.
The problem? Both my brother’s sister and his brother’s wife have the exact same name. They have identical first name, middle name and last name. Because they live in the same neighborhood, their kids go to the same school and they use some of the same doctors. It has caused a lot of confusion - they often get phone calls for each other. I sometimes wonder if my BIL’s wishes she used her maiden name at least as her middle name (she has an easily spelled Italian maiden name).
Funny thing is that their first name is not common. It’s not unusual but it’s not that common and it has several different ways to spell it but they both use the same spelling!
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That seems like the kind of situation where the credit reporting companies decide that they are the same person and merge their credit histories (they seem to believe that two people are the same person with less similarity than that).
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“their kids go to the same school “ . Delicate q- sister never married. Is she in a partnership?
@jym626 She has children but has never married.
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This happened to me and my mother who had similar first names, and she had taken my father’s last name when they married.
When I bought my first new car in my late 20s my credit was very good and they asked if I had had a mortgage in 198x when I was around 14… ummm, no.
We also had similar careers and subscribed to the same professional organizations and publications. Often they would merge our accounts and we had to get them unmerged several times. We have an unique Italian last name (not particularly common in Italy, America, or Canada), and I wonder if the same would have happened if it were a more common last name in America/in general.
My mother took my father’s last name when they married and swapped her birth middle name for her maiden name as her middle name. When she earned her DMA she switched from Mrs. to Dr.
I never married, rather was in a long term domestic partnership. If we had decided to marry I would have kept my name. Not sure what we would have done if we had decided to have children. Both names are on the long side, and would not have hyphenated particularly well.
I have friends who have kept their family names, have taken one or the other’s name, have hyphenated, or have created a new name when marrying. I think it is great that people can chose the path best for them, and I celebrate and honor them and their choices
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I feel for Dr. HerLastName.
Signed,
Dr. MyLastName
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So interesting. I suspect a great deal of the differences in people’s observations are caused by social circles and maybe regions (I’m in the urban Northeast). Also, perhaps the countries of origin of one’s social circle? Or possibly a function of the number of LGBT families in one’s social circle?
Among my own friends and the parents of my children’s friends, more women kept their own last names or hyphenated both names than fully changed to their spouses’ last names. In the vast majority of such heterosexual couples, the children either have the father’s last name or the full hyphenated name. I can only think of one where the children have the mother’s name not the father’s. So while the woman may have kept her name, the children have been given their father’s name or a hyphen.
With both straight and gay couples, usually when one spouse hyphenated so did the the other spouse, but in some cases, one spouse kept the original name while the other hyphenated. I do think in some cases, it seems like was a professional decision to keep the original name or hyphenate.
I also know two couples (one straight and one lesbian) who merged their last names to create a new family name. Also one straight couple where both the husband and kids have the wife’s original name. There are also a few divorced moms of my kids’ friends where I am not sure what happened since I met the family post-divorce. Did the mother originally take her husband’s last name and change it back or did she just keep her own name to begin with? Not sure.
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