Indeed we haven't run into many problems. Maybe an annoyance now and then such as a relative (usually one of hers, ironically) that assumes she has my last name and sends cards or letters to Mrs XXX. In fact some of them know she kept her maiden name but are conservative enough to find this somehow offensive enough that they give her my last name. (Again, weird, what's wrong with the last name she shares with them.)
(The only reason we sometimes wish she'd change her name is that hers is extremely common, and so she's constantly getting mixups with other people with the same name and has to sign things every time we buy a house or get a loan, etc. to say she isn't that other XXX YYY that has the bad credit rating or outstanding loan or criminal record, etc.)
Being married to a woman with her own last name, and a stepdaughter with her own last name, I can tell you that none of what you describe is really a problem.
In fact, it’s worked well enough for us that if we were to have another child we’d consider giving him or her a different last name again instead of picking one of the three we already have.
Presumably, if she wanted to change her name to avoid these problems she'd have done that independently. Most people would not want to change their name because of badly programmed systems.
Also, many people (and many cultures) consider adopting your husband's surname to be weird.
Nothing "wrong" with it and there aren't any "issues" in that you won't drop to the ground scratching your head on what to do in a certain situation if you don't change your name. That doesn't mean there aren't advantages to normalizing last names in a household though.
I'm currently engaged and plan on taking her last name after the wedding. Life would go on very large the same way if I didn't the same way it will if I do. The whole problem is overblown.
OK, so if someone got married and changed their last name, you would feel OK continuing to refer to them by their maiden name? Even if they no longer used that name and asked you to use their new name? You wouldn't expect any kind of social consequences for that?
My mother has gone by her middle name for her entire life, with almost everything she signs up for completely omitting that her first name even exists.
I kept expecting it to cause her problems, but it doesn't seem to have. Of course, dealing with the government means she has to use her first name sometimes, but that's it.
I don't really find it any harder than picking up someone going my Mrs. rather than Ms. or someone changing last name. There's usually an adjustment period, of course, but it's not that hard to pick up personally.
My wife decided not to take my name, and I was cool with that (there were very practical reasons to avoid a name change).
I have a male friend who took his wife's last name, actually (his reason was that his surname is basically the most common in the country, which made his full name highly non-unique)!
I never understood why modern women still tend to change their name. It's definitely not something anyone expects, in my experience at least.
Are we just talking about men? Most women are basically expected to change their last name upon marriage in many countries.
To me it's just a name. My wife kept her last name and and it seems the past generations simply can't accept that. My extended family still mails her letters using my last name.
My wife and I have been married for almost 20 years. But she has never taken my last name.
When we were engaged, I learned that she wasn’t planning on taking my last name, and the thought didn’t really bother me —- I felt it was her choice to do as she wished in that regard, and it wouldn’t change the fact that we were married.
As it turned out, she already had a number of years of experience as a lawyer with her existing name, and there would have been a reputational cost to the change, so she just wanted to keep her name. Makes total sense to me!
Since then, I’ve been called “Mr. Geyer” more than a few times, and I’m kind of used to it by now —- maybe about as much as women get called Mrs. Husband-name, when they didn’t actually change theirs.
Household-wise, we are the “Geyer-Knowles Family”, by dint of alphabetical sorting. We don’t have children, but if we did, then they might have a hyphenated last name.
Now, I do have a male friend who changed his last name to match that of his wife after they got married, and the story I heard was that he never liked his last name. So that totally made sense.
I hope for her sake they're not long names... The number of issues I've had due to too given names being too long has been quite frustrating. E.g. banking systems that can't fit my full name into their systems.
I’ve been married for over 4 years now and my wife still hasn’t changed her name. She was in college when we got married and it was a pain to change all of the documents halfway through her education so we put it off.
The only time it’s even a minor inconvenience is picking up mail in the odd chance that the post office won’t leave it in our small apartment mailbox so one of us has to pick it up from the post office.
All the software in the world is setup for different surnames due to long term, live in boyfriend/girlfriend situations, as well as wives who want to concatenate their new name with the old. Marriage has been condensed to a checkbox on every important form and I’m glad it’s that way.
We’ve decided that our children will take my name and my wife will likely change hers then to make it easier for them to remember while growing up, but until then, we’re in no hurry.
We actually couldn't open a joint bank account with both names separated. They'd accept the papers signed in the official names, but the names on the cards and other communication needed to be unified for their system to accept it. They'd accept to reemit card with the correct names only as an exception by abusing the card renewal system apparently
My sister, when she got married to a Stevens, changed her name to First name, Second name, Even, Stevens. I won't put her full name for obvious reasons.
My wife changed her name on marriage at least partially because her surname (Finnish) is hard to pronounce for random people here in the UK.
(She's a doctor so she'd has to introduce herself with it on a constant basis to patients - "Hello I'm Dr. Xxxx" - Now she has a surname that is easy to pronounce and a forename people often get wrong.)
Even when a woman does change her last name after marriage, believing that her maiden name is somehow secret information in this day and age seems about as secure as "what street did you grow up on?", or "what was your high school mascot?". The root of the problem is believing that security questions are a good practice to begin with.
My wife has the same maiden name as her mom, with a middle initial that is one letter apart.
This flags more corrective correlation, so despite having a different last name for 19 years, insurance companies and Bank of America get them confused. The insurance is worse because you cannot appeal insurance data.
There's a lot of systems which seem to assume that name changes are of fraudulent intent, rather than being fairly routine when women get married. Let alone the long list of other reasons to change one's name.
Four generations of men in my family have the same name other than suffix. At times three of them lived at the same address. It has caused a number of issues over the years, including unintended cross access to bank accounts. Despite the problems it sometimes creates, they seem to be amused by the confusion.
(The only reason we sometimes wish she'd change her name is that hers is extremely common, and so she's constantly getting mixups with other people with the same name and has to sign things every time we buy a house or get a loan, etc. to say she isn't that other XXX YYY that has the bad credit rating or outstanding loan or criminal record, etc.)
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