A Rose by Any Other Name

The Last Name Question is a doozy in modern marriages. The idea of the bride taking the groom's last name is heavy with implications of ownership and submission. It's definitely an archaic, outdated symbol, and yet it's still somewhat expected. My B2B (bride to be for future posts) and I have been reminding each other nearly daily that this is about us and not what the rest of the world thinks about us, and yet every time we discuss the name thing at least one of us ends up asking 'will people think that's weird'?

We talked very briefly about me taking her last name, but that seemed more like just sticking it to the patriarchy than finding a more egalitarian tradition. Of course, the hyphenation option was introduced long ago specifically to make things more equal, but we both think that it's just silly. My biggest problem with it is imagining our grandchildren with names like Brian Anderson-Yoshikawa-Smith-Obama-McDonald-Simons. You can see the issue here. Also, as a side rant I would like to state that in my non-feminist groom researching I came across a site (in 2008 mind you) that said about hyphenation: "For teachers and for women with established careers, this option is understandable." WTF, mate?

Almost as briefly as my taking her last name we talked about each keeping our own last name, but as a symbol it still felt wrong for us. Getting married is supposed to be about merging our lives, so why symbolically keep them seperate? Also there's the kid issue again - do we give daughters her last name and sons mine? Visa versa? Alternate last names? Does that mean we're obligated to have an even number of children?

The two options we've talked about the most are either just making up an entirely new last name, or picking parts of each of our last names and smooshing them together. We lean more towards the smooshing option, as picking a brand new last name seems a little disrespectful to our respective family histories. The only issue with it is that we keep coming up with things that sound pretty silly. And while silly could be fun on the day of, signing Jojobilgorsploot for the rest of one's life could get wearing. At this point I think we're nearly settled on an acceptable smooshing. I'm sure it'll take some explaining to our families (mine more than hers probably, since tradition says she should give hers up anyway), but it just seems right for us. We're combining instead of giving up, we're taking a unified name, and hopefully future generations won't suffer too much from it. We are going to have to leave detailed notes for future genealogists though.... I'm thinking in a dusty box in the attic.