Marriage and the name problem
Who should be named what after a marriage is a complicated issue. But not nearly complicated enough.
There should be a law saying that when two people get married, one has to change his or her last name for sure, but the other has to change something in their name too - though it doesn’t have to be last name. Even better, one person - traditionally the woman - has to change two of their names (choosing between first, last and middle), while the other person only has to change one.
So let’s say there are two people getting married. They’re absolutely perfect for each other. Obviously! They’re getting married! But what to do about their names?
The man: Fydor Henrik Lowing
The Woman: Christa Katie Johnson
The woman is traditional and has a boring last name. She’s going to want to change it. So that makes her Christa Katie Lowing. It also makes her the best candidate for being the one to have to change two of her names.
So she could become Christa Fydor Lowing.
Fydor Henrik Lowing changes his name as slightly as he possibly can, so he goes for the middle name approach. However, he wants to keep it manly, so he changes his name to Fydor Johnson Lowing.
Note that the trade doesn’t have to be first for first, middle for middle, last for last. Fydor took Christa’s last name and made that his middle name. Christa took Fydor’s first name and made it her middle name. She also could have taken his first name and made that her last name, and his middle name and made that her first. She could have become Henrik Katie Fydor, for instance.
The beauty here is that she still maintains her identity completely, but nobody will ever forget who she married.
However, let’s say that Fydor has suffered a lot of discrimination in our country (where he was born and raised), mostly because of his unusual name. Nobody wants to hire or befriend someone who seems to have foreign roots, and his life has been nothing but one misery after another as a result. It’s a miracle that Christa ever looked in his direction, and a testament to the severity of the country’s disdain for foreign names that he would be forced to marry someone who is so objectively worse than him. He would kill to have a name even half as boring as his wife’s.
He could, then, become Katie Henrik Johnson, and finally blend in to the American background as was his dream. And maybe marry up next time.
A different solution to the marriage name taking problem could be a tit-for-tat name trade. If you take your spouse’s last name, then your spouse has to take your last name. Again, they don’t have to use the name the same way as you did. They could take your last name and make it their first name, even while you take their last name and make it your last name. Just as long as the names are traded evenly.
6 years ago