What’s in a name?

Twenty-four years ago I was in the middle of planning my wedding and we were about to book the honeymoon. The travel agent asked what name I would be travelling under and I paused. I looked at my future husband and then back to the travel agent and said I would travel under my birth name to save hassle. But it wasn’t to save hassle, it was the first time I realised that the world expected me to rename myself just because I was getting married.

I spent an uncomfortable week trying on my husband’s name, writing it out and practicing the signature but nothing felt right. The following weekend I nervously told my fiance how I felt, that my name was still my name. Didn’t I want to marry him?, he asked. Of course I did but it just felt odd to be asked to change your identity half way through your life. And why was it my name that needed to change? Lots of cultures across the world don’t make women do this and it isn’t an issue. He didn’t see that changing my name as a problem so I offered him the option of changing to my name. For a week he thought carefully and then let me know that, yes, it was weird so let’s both keep our names and figure it out as we go.

Since then we have run the gamut. There have been the bank clerks who refused to believe I wanted to keep my unmarried name. There were the family, even my own, who claimed they found it too difficult to remember my unmarried surname despite the fact we shared it for almost 30 years. There were the primary school teachers who paused judgmentally every single time they saw I had a different name to my son. Having a different name implied I hadn’t been married to his father, as if that mattered to them or his education. There were the medical staff at my son’s birth who, after we gave him my surname as his first name, insisted on him being called the equivalent of “James James” on his birth record.

So why do we still do this? Why do we change our names as if we had to belong to our husbands? Why can’t we make it the norm to not change it, or to come up with something new? And just as importantly, can we drop the whole Miss, and Mrs thing and just opt for Ms? Men get to be Mr for their whole lives. Why does it matter that we publicly show our marital status if we are female?