The Sometime Blogger Formerly Known As…
Hello all!
Sorry I’ve been kind of out of touch for a month or so. I’ve had a lot of big things going on, the second-biggest of which was getting a new job.
The first-biggest, of course, is that I went and got hitched.
I still haven’t mastered the art of putting photos on here, so I can’t really do that. Not that I have any good ones yet, anyway, since the professional ones take some time to put together. (Although, if anyone wants to help me out with this, I will gladly email you one you can add.)
Anyway! I’m not quite back together enough to start posting with a ton of regularity, but I’m hoping to get there soon. The main reason I’m putting this particular post up is that I have taken the unorthodox step of taking my wife’s name instead of vice versa (be the change you want to see in the world!). Since I’m changing my display name and will no longer be known as “Ryan Bonneville”, I just wanted to let everyone know.
Two other things: I’m still working on arranging my transportation to Vegas (in case this convinces anyone to try harder to come or, more likely, not to come), and Tod Kelly is a man among men.
You can email the photo to me and I’ll get it up after 5 if nobody else does.Report
Ryan married Peggy Noonan?Report
I was going to make a Caddyshack joke myself.Report
Sick/hilarious fact: Daniel is on our baby-name shortlist.Report
Mazel tov! Will Mrs. Noonan be joining us in Las Vegas?
I will be very interested in learning about the experience of changing your last name. My wife took my name and more than seven years later the process is still incomplete. So your experience, coming in a somewhat less common form, promises to be interesting indeed.Report
I know a couple wherein both changed their name to an amalgam of their previous names. I know several where they both retained their original last name.
They’re all a pain in the ass, as near as I can tell.Report
My wife let me keep mine.Report
My cousin and her wife created an amalgamated last name when they got married. It worked out well for them, but I suspect there are other name combinations where it won’t work so nicely.Report
Unlikely we’ll be seeing her. We are both fairly sad about this.Report
I have a male friend who changed his last name for personal reasons (I think he had a falling out with his family). He married, and his wife took his chosen name. I hadn’t been aware that he’d changed his name until I got an invitation to his wedding.
My wife intended to hyphenate, and swears she is going to one of these days, but all of the licensure issues with medicine make it a more daunting task than usual.
My preference was that she takes my name, at least socially if not professionally or legally. Outside of that, I don’t really have a preference as far as hyphenation versus keeping her birth name. Truthfully, having different last names is less of a big deal than I had expected it to be.
The reasoning behind my preference mostly has to do with basic conformity. I do understand the issue of norms. The tradition I would prefer conform to is that each party keeps their name, daughters take their mother’s name, sons take their father’s, and household names are hyphenated. But those aren’t the norms we have.Report
“My wife intended to hyphenate, and swears she is going to one of these days”
In the big picture, that is a solution that only works for a generation or so. Then eventually, after enough generations go by, everyone has the same last name, but in a different order.Report
Could always go the Spanish route.Report
ThisReport
What I’ve always wondered about that is: what happens after a few generations? Do people have like forty last names?Report
Some do. For the most part the formal name is restricted to mother/father. Sometimes if they’re descended from someone really important, they do the whole shooting match. But at most it’s usually traced to grandparents.Report
That’s why I like my proposed system, which is that it can span generations.
Our children will take my last name, though, so hers would be the only one hyphenated.
But yeah, that’s one of my big problems with hyphenation.
There is virtue in the Spanish route, as Nob points out.Report
It’s the Hohenzollern Effect: soon enough you end up with something that looks like Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.Report
Over one generation, though, it can be helpful. For instance, a coworker of my wife’s has a hyphenated last name that’s like McCarren-Smith. So when I had a kid in a class I filled in for whose last name was McCarren-Smith, I knew it had to be a son or relative of my wife’s coworker. I would have suspected McCarren, and known Smith, but the combo name clinched it. But yeah, beyond that, it’s trouble.
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Err, that should say, “I might have suspected McCarren but wouldn’t have guessed Smith.”Report
Apropos of very little, my favorite coffee house in Portland has the hyphenated name of the Rimsky-Korsakoffee House.Report
Whoever came up with that name ought to be shotReport
Marilyn Vos Savant (of difficult-to-hyphenate name herself) suggested a pattern that makes a lot of sense to me.
No one changes their name on marriage. Boys take their father’s last name. Girls take their mother’s. Everyone has a reasonable chance of carrying on their family name, and no one has to do any additional paperwork.
Vice versa would work equally well, as would a same-sex couple dividing up naming rights on the kids’ genders however they preferred.Report
It’s not far from the method used in parts of Scandinavia (or ti used to be at least, I’m not sure of the details) whereby a son’s surname is _____sen where ___ is the father’s given name, for girls it’s ______dotter where _____ is the mother’s given name.Report
This is what they do in Iceland; the suffixes are “-son” and “-dottir.” Of course it works there; Iceland was long an isolated and homogenous population and the geneologies are well-known by allReport
I propose: Every child takes the name of the parent they like the most.Report
Claus Philipp Maria Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg[1] commonly referred to as Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, aka Claus von Stauffenberg, aka Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg;
or
Stephanie Freifrau von und zu Guttenberg (neé Gräfin von Bismarck-Schönhausen)Report
Congratulations!Report
Welcome back, Mr. Noonan! Many, many congratulations!
And thanks for the shout out. Same goes back to you.Report
Also, I can also get a photo up if you want to email it over.Report
It’s wonderful to be married.
Maintain a sense of humor.
Be sure to have married someone who can maintain a sense of humor.
Good luck!
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Congrats!
My wife was supposed to take my name, which is long, spelled incorrectly, pronounced incorrectlyer, and just a general mess. We’ve been married 8.5 months now and she still has her short, phonetic name.Report
My (now ex) husband took my last name when we married 4 years ago. It confused the people at the local social security office, but it was a breeze mostly. We got a few looks when he listed his former name as his “maiden” name on paperwork.Report
BTW, he is changing it back now that we are no longer married.Report
Many congrats! Missing Vegas continues to be an increasingly bitter cup.Report
Congrats, Ryan!
My wife kept her last name, hyphenation has all the problems Will mentioned above, but it’s been a hassle. I don’t know how much of it is just the state of Georgia but we have to pull out the marriage certificate a lot more often than I think we should because people ( most importantly, state officials) want proof that two people with different last names are married. You guys will avoid that problem, at least!Report
I expected more in the way of social conflicts (particularly because we live in Deep Red America), but really most of the problems we’ve had have been as you described: entities not believing we’re married or not making common privacy exceptions on the basis that we’re married. For instance, I complained about a particular credit card that wouldn’t let me make a payment on my wife’s account and was told by someone (with a shared last name) that they did that sort of thing all the time. Nobody has flinched or rolled their eyes or done anything rude about it (like insisting on calling her by my name or vice-versa), though, which I was lead to believe would happen.
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When we bought our first house the month after we got back from our honeymoon, our job duties meant that my wife did most of the daytime legwork, and I did the sitting and hearing what she had learned at night. So when it came time to fill out all of the various mortgage paperwork, she filled out the first slots of personal information and i filled out the second.
When we moved in, we started getting all of this junk mail for new home buyers, and it was obvious that our mortgage company had sold our info and that we were automatically assumed a gender by our order of info. SO she got all kinds of catalogues for power tools and garage-stuff, and I got the stuff for drapes, dish ware and vacuum cleaners.Report
Damn fine looking couple. Congrats.Report
“I have taken the unorthodox step of taking my wife’s name instead of vice versa.”
These are the moments that I realize I am not quite ready for modern culture. But nevermind that, congrats! Marrying my wife was the smartest decision of my life and after 7+ years I hope you will feel the same way. The best ones make us better men.Report
Even better? My best man was a woman. (Although technically we didn’t have a bridal party, she spoke during the ceremony and gave the traditional best man toast during dinner.)Report
I don’t plan on changing my name unless my future wife has an awesome one, but unless something changes between now and when I get married I plan on having a Best Woman, my flatmate. I’ve asked if I could call her a Best Broad, but she said no. Not that I’m going to be getting married any time soon. Traveling 25 weeks of the year tends to put a damper on relationships.
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Eh, the best man as a woman thing doesn’t raise eyebrows any more in California.Report
Or with anyone in my generation. I’ve been to more weddings with non tradition wedding party roles than I’ve been to weddings with traditional roles.Report
I hope you love marriage as much as I do.Report
Congrats!Report
Congratulations, Mr. Noonan!Report
Congrats!Report
Congratulations, Ryan! Hope you make it to Vegas. Bonneville was a pretty cool name, though. For my wife and I we both opted to just keep our own names since neither of us particularly cared to give them up.Report
Ticket to Vegas is booked! I’m in!Report
Awesome in the extreme! Will Mrs. Noonan be with us too? (And were you able to get the group rate?)
Looking forward to meeting you.Report
No Mrs. Noonan, which is a shame, but I did get the group rate. I booked the hotel a few days ago, figuring I would just cancel it if I couldn’t work out the flight.Report
Probably a mundane question, but how does that all work out legally? Is our system built to accommodate male surname changes?Report
Not ideally, but there is a process for men to change their names. As I mention above, a friend of mine did without getting married. Another friend changed his name when he changed from a him to a her.Report
When we got married in Canada, we were both given the option to change our names, as (I understood) all couples were offered.
We both declined, as we both were already thinking of our professional reputations. And search engine optimization, too: “Jason Kuznicki” isn’t quite unique, but it’s close enough.Report
Sure. It turns out the major thing you have to do is get a new Social Security card. The SSA doesn’t particularly care – as far as I know – which direction the name change goes, as long as you can present a recent marriage license with both names on it. Once you have a Social Security card, you can get a new driver’s license, and then you have the two most important pieces of ID it’s possible to have.Report
Such liberal sensibilities are so cute. My mother the liberated woman wanted to hyphenate her name. She did and it was a disaster. She got mail in her maiden name, married hyphenated name and in my father’s name. I told my fiance that she was joining my tribe and taking my name.Report
OH, THE HORROR!Report
As long as the bank takes the checks, you can call me “Rita” on an envelope.Report
Will:
Your sad attempts to be clever aside, that was only the most visible effect of her attempt to be liberated. As a kid I got tired of explaining to others why my last name was different.Report
So you’re acknowledging that the patriarchy did indeed keep her down, eh?Report
As I had said above, I’d actually expected some degree of confusion and maybe even some assholery when my wife chose to keep her name, but thus far we have actually received almost none.
I don’t really understand the point behind hyphenation, but the two-names thing has been pretty smooth sailing (smoother, more likely than not, than the hassle of medical licensure issues involved with multiple names).Report
What a lucky gal.Report
Classy.Report
In case anyone is curious, I got a Social Security card issued in my new name today. It took 5 minutes and almost no effort.Report
But I also got mail addressed to Ryan Bonneville, so it probably wasn’t worth it.Report
While I totally respect people ‘s various naming choices I have to admit that I didnt really feel like I was officially married until my wife’s name change came through. I still love hearing my last name on her voicemail at work.
I will also say that my daughter having my last name even though her mother and i were never marriws made school docs about 100 times easier to navigate.Report
Wow I totally missed this. I was wondering why Ryan had changed his surname and I stumbled upon this. Anyway belated congratulations!Report