67 thoughts on “The Sometime Blogger Formerly Known As…”

  3. 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

    1. 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

      2. 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

    3. 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

      1. “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

        2. 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

          1. 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.

             Report

          2. 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

            1. 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

              1. 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

          3. 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

  6. 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

  7. 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

  9. 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

    1. 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.

       Report

      1. 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

  11. “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

      1. 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.

         Report

  16. 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

  17. Probably a mundane question, but how does that all work out legally? Is our system built to accommodate male surname changes?Report

    2. 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

    3. 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

  18. 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

      2. 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

        2. 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

    2. 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

  20. Wow I totally missed this. I was wondering why Ryan had changed his surname and I stumbled upon this. Anyway belated congratulations!Report

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