My (66f) SO (58m) and I are getting married this year after 15 years together. He is a divorce & I
am a widow.
When I married in my late 20’s, as was the norm at the time, I took my husband’s surname, and
this is the name I have been known by for the last 40-ish years. We had two children, a girl & a boy. My daughter has married & taken her husband’s surname, and my son never married or had any children and is recently deceased. My in laws had only one son (my husband) and therefore my son was the last in line to carry the family name, so this stops with him.
On my husband’s side, he is an only son and has one daughter who will shortly be married & will take her husband’s name, meaning that his family name also stops with him. None of us believes in hyphenating surnames because the forward implications of that mean never-ending doubling of double-barrelled names resulting in complete idiocy.
I have no particular attachment to my current surname apart from the fact that this is the name I have been known by for 40 years, neither have I any interest in taking my new husband’s name and we had decided between us that I would carry on using my known name after our marriage, to keep things simple.
However. This week, he told me he had had a dream that we both changed our names to
something that is dear to both of us, and woke up thinking that this might be an option. It
sounded good with both of our names, and would be very personal to us. The more we talked about it & the more I thought about it, the better the idea seemed, and I began looking into how to go about it. Turns out, it’s not difficult or expensive, and we decided to go for it. However, he wants to wait until his father, who is 93 and has dementia, is no longer alive, because he feels that the surname is important to him and would very much not want to upset him. I have agreed
to this, and we are hoping to do the name change possibly on our fist wedding anniversary.
While I understand my fiance not wanting to upset his elderly father, I cannot for the life of me uderstand the mindset of anyone being so attached to their surname (it’s a very basic British surname & there are thousands of them in the UK) that it would upset them to know that their son decided to change his name to something that is special to him, especially when there is no chance he will now produce any more children to ”carry on” the lineage.
Can anyone explain to me the importance of the “family name” and why people (it mainly seems to be men) get so weird about it? I had great parents & a great childhood, and changing my name didn’t change anything abut that or the way I feel about my parents.
We have both done our
family trees through Ancestry.com and while I found it quite fascinating, I’m well aware that
whatever & whoever my ancestors were has very little bearing on who I am, because whatever family you are born into is completely a matter of luck. While we are definitely a product of our parents, and in some cases grandparents, this is only because of the direct input these people
have on our lives. Those who came hundreds of years before them are largely irrelevant, in my humble opinion.