I think the topic I'm going to talk about is something that everyone is bound to have different opinions on, and different personal experiences too. This is mine.
Growing up, I just assumed that I would take my future husband’s surname when we got married (I also assumed I would get married, which is probably a whole other blog post!), it was never something that I thought to question.
The wife taking the husband’s name was just ‘normal’ it was just ‘how it was’. So why would/should it be any different for me?
I even remember thinking as a young girl (and it turns out, into adulthood up until the age of 26), that I didn’t yet know what my full name was going to be for the majority of my life!
What a funny idea when you think about it: having no idea what your own name will be.
But, as I say, at that time it never occurred to me that something might not be right about that. Or about what that said about me, purely because of my gender.
It was only when I got engaged, and suddenly what had been theoretical was becoming reality, that I started to feel conflicted about changing my name. It was almost this sense of unease: I was presented with what my new name would be and the exact date that it would change, but that person didn’t feel like me. I couldn’t identify with her.
I’d lived my whole 26 years as Lisa Woodlock, that was who I was, and the combination of having ovaries and new a ring on my finger wouldn't change that.
And the more questions I started to ask into why we take the man’s surname, the less sense it made.
Historically in the UK, wives only started taking their husband’s names around the time of the 15th Century, prior to that married women were regarded as having no surname at all.
As one court ruled in 1340, “when a woman took a husband, she lost every surname except ‘wife of’”. Seriously.
And then further back than that, 1000 years ago, hereditary surnames in England weren’t even a thing!
Which leads on to the line of argument that says that the “family name” should be carried on down the generations. But, what about the family name’s of women? Why are they less important than that of men’s?
My Dad has 2 daughters, is it ok for no one to take his name forward? And what about my mum’s maiden name? Does that not matter? To me, it just doesn’t add up!
As a Christian, I wanted to take my faith into account too, especially in such a big life decision. To cut a long story extremely short, the Genesis 2 verse that talks about marriage says “a man leaves his father and mother and is united to his wife” - note the only party leaving their parents here is the guy... and as far as the Ephesians 5 passage that talks about submission goes, it starts with “submit to one another in love”, and the rest I hold as contextual to the time it was written. (I said I was cutting a long story extremely short here!)
Married friends I spoke to gave me mixed opinions as well.
One friend told me about how she’d been so happy to take her husband’s name because she’d had such a hard time with her family and really wanted to feel part of his instead.
Another friend told me how hard she found it now to have given up her name, and the feelings of having lost something that she had. How she wished she’d followed her uneasy gut feelings about changing it.
I've also had at least 2 friends who haven't really wanted to change their names, but have done so with an almost fatalistic view of 'it has to happen because that's just how things are done'.
When I spoke to Tim about my feelings on this, he was totally wonderful and said that he didn’t mind and would be happy to take my surname instead... until 10 minutes later when he turned around and said that he totally got what I’d meant and didn’t want to lose his surname either!
We decided that whatever surname we had, we wanted it to be the same one as each other. So then we had 2 options that we could see (or that Google could suggest to us): double-barrel or merge.
We thought about double-barrelling but our names were a bit of a mouthful together, so then we started talking about merging our names. It just made sense; a way to represent both of our families and to bring them together to make a new family name. We felt this was the perfect way to symbolise what would actually be happening as we got married. It wasn’t that either of us were leaving our families behind, it was that we were bringing them together and making a new one!
How to merge the names though? We didn’t know anyone else who had!
We went through about every combination of Hearson and Woodlock that there is. From the first half of either name with the second half of the other, to completely random anagrams of all of the letters! In the end, Woodson was the option that actually sounded like a real name, so that was the winner.
Our decision to merge our names was largely met with excitement and enthusiasm (although occasionally with confusion or raised eyebrows!), and overall our nearest and dearest have been nothing but supportive, which we’ve been so grateful for.
This is mine and Tim’s story, the way we’ve chosen to approach our married names. For other people it will be different. The only thing I’d say to anyone who’s in a position of thinking about married names: make sure you ask questions before making a life-long decision. Things might have been a certain way for hundreds of years, but that doesn’t make it ok and it doesn’t mean that we have to live by it too. We can change things, we have that power.
Lisa xx
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