Last names post marriage

In Brazil it seems to be standard practice that children take their mother's name and their father's name. This is quite a headache when you have to write out their full legal name (four names, baby!). Wonder what it would be like if that were standard practice for marriage, couples take each other's last names.

it occurs to me, i don't know about other countries, but in the u.s. you can choose to create a surname...pretty much at any time in your life...generally many states limit the number of times you can do this, and the process is very time consuming not to mention expensive...

For a few years now, people have been keeping their names when they get married here in Switzerland. Causes a heck of a lot of confusion (and probably divorces) when the kids are born, as you then have to choose one of the names for them.

Another idea could be for the kids to take the surname of the same sex'd parent - the point being that while maternal mitochondrial DNA is passed onto children in both sex types, the paternal Y chromosome is passed only to the boys.

So the boys have something unique from the father, while both son and daughter will have unique mitochondrial DNA from the mother. This way the paternal name line can be preserved in boys while the maternal name line is preserver through girls, with both being legitimate pathways to determine genetic lineage (to some extent).

Perhaps in that model a new shared middle name would become the given 'family' name to represent the parent-child group.

If I ever get married I actually want to take my wife's name. It is just my preference for the man to take the woman's name because you can never truly prove who the father is short of DNA tests, but you can prove who the mother is, provided their are witnesses which there are 99.99999999 . . .% of the time.

if i find a woman crazy enough to marry me and awesome enough for me to marry i wont care a hoot about what name we use

Unnatural? Obviously they never met Mexicans (I'm not sure if that's a overall hispanic thing or not, but I do know it's traditional in Mexican families).

I was not particularly fond of my last name because of the "lack of history" it had. Long-complicated story, basically ending with "my grandfather didn't even know know if Benton was his last name" type of story, otherwise I might have considered becoming "Benton-Thompson" or "Thompson-Benton"...come to think of it, those both sound a bit too strange, I've already got an odd first name, lol

I think the only problem here is if people change their name because it's tradition or a 'default'. If people think about their options and pick what they want, not because they feel pressured by tradition or their partner, but because they like the name, that's fine, no matter who changes their name or if anyone does. I didn't change my name when I married my husband, nor did he expect me to. The only reason we didn't change our names at all is because our last names together are a mouthful and sound terrible hyphenated, and we couldn't think of an interesting almalgamation of our names to have a new last name altogether (which does, work, I have two friends who melded the letters of their last names to create a new one that worked beautifully). We decided to keep our current names, and are happy about that choice. When we have kids, we will have a new conversation about whose name is their middle name and whose is their last name (a family tradition of mine).

Long story short, there shoudn't be a default, and none of this is complex or difficult. You have a right to keep or change your name according to *your* whims and desires. The only time I feel this is uncomfortable is when people just default to tradition without thinking through other possibilities with their partner.

Much love,
Kai-An

Jamie Stick wrote: I don't know if I'll ever get married, I've kind of got a lot of political reasons for not getting married... However...

If I were to get married, I wouldn't change my name. My understanding is that among European Western cultures, the tradition of changing the last name was the final step in transferring property. What property? The wife, of course. Women were considered property and changing last names was an ancient equivalent to changing the title on a car.

You know and understand nothing of western european cultures.

When I got married my wife took my last name as a sign of change. When we got divorced she kept my name because it sounded cooler.