What happens to surnames when you get married

I’ve just got married, I have changed my last name.  In the interest of remaining anonymous (like Batman) I’m going to simply say my last name is Smith and my wife’s is Chang (false names). 

I of course wanted her to change her name.  I’ve grown up seeing people do that, my parents did that, it’s a normal thing to do that.  But WHY!?!  I decided my main reason was that I wanted to create a single family.  I didn’t want the Chang and the Smith I wanted to be “The Smiths” (the family, not the band)

How much does a name matter?  Probably not much.  But I give me the words navy and turquoise and I’ll be able to pick out two colours.  Give me the word blue and they will seem more unified.  And it only postpones the argument of what you call your children.

So this gives four main choices,

She takes my name,

·         She takes my name “The Smiths”

·         I take her name “The Changs”

·         Mix them up “The Smangs” or make a new one “The Thunderhawks”

·         Hyphenate or double-barrel “The Chang-Smiths”

Now I don’t want to take her name any more than she wants to take mine.  However I have an argument.  She is Chinese I’m not.  If she took my name people would think she got married and changed her name.  They wouldn’t bat an eyelid. 

If I took her name people would know I changed my name and I would be seen as an under the thumb husband and afforded less respect in business deals etc. So basically “it’s tradition” combined with a certain “don’t rock the boat” and “the other kids will pick on me”. 

However what if I still went to church because if I didn’t people would think I was immoral (old fashioned view now but there you go).  Or what if I didn’t let my wife drive because people would think I had no control of her (again, an old fashioned view or Iran)  So perhaps for every change there must be someone who takes the flack, and in my case it’s very weak and not very serious flack. 

Perhaps as women become the leaders of more and more companies I will have an advantage?  But this doesn’t seem fair.  She keeps all of her name and I keep none of mine.  So I shelve this idea.

If you mix our names together you don’t get the Smangs but all the combos we could think of are equally stupid sounding.   (jury is out on Thunderhawk)

That leaves hyphenation.  And that’s what we’ve gone with, saving you the details of the arguments about hyphen or not, who is first etc.  We have settled on “Chang Smith”.  This means in restaurant bookings we are generally Chang and in internet forms we usually come out as Smith.  But there you go. 

Our kids will be little Chang Smiths and we will at some point do the legal stuff with deed polls.  However at the moment we’ve only gone as far as updating Facebook. 

What will our kids do?  As this kind of thing gets more common kids are going to have to deal with 4 then 8 then 16 names!  Thoughts and stuff welcome.  Do you have hyphenated parents? What are you called? Do you have any other ideas. 

Regards

Bucky O’Hare