My daughter is convinced she won’t be taking her husband’s last name. I was initially happy that her current name, our family name, would live on even if my son didn’t follow the married-with-children route. But my daughter isn’t concerned with keeping our family name either. She wants a totally new name, a fresh name, one that isn’t connected to the past. I think my daughter is right.
The best decision regarding surnames is to follow what should really happen when a couple gets married. The two become one. The husband doesn’t join the wife and the wife doesn’t join the husband. Two individuals both leave their father and mother to join one another. This makes it odd that those two would pick the husband’s name to share. It’s one of those traditions that perpetuate the myth that, when you get married you marry the whole family.
When my wife and I got married in 1993, I don’t recall a discussion about who would take whose name. We talked about where we would live, we talked about our dream jobs and we talked about having children. We assumed that Robin would take my family name and become Mrs. Philip Page. That tradition was as automatic as ‘something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue’.
I wish my wife and I had had the courage to share a new last name. We laughed at the Hollywood couples who did this – when Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie became Brangelina – but breaking free of the family name would have been a good way to break free from the family history. My family history included lessons of wives who cared for the home and husbands who cared for everything else. It wasn’t bad or wrong. It was just his-story told from ‘his’ view.
Our wedding – full of tradition and small-budget grandeur – displayed both the old model of marriage and the new vision. The old model could be seen in the old traditions. Families separated by aisle. Robin’s father responding to the pastor’s question, “Who gives this woman to be married”. The pastor pronouncing our union and announcing us for the first time as “Mr. and Mrs. Philip Page, Jr.”
The best part of the wedding, however, was a small but significant expression of our new vision for marriage. It happened at the end of the wedding reception after Robin and I had our belongings packed into a U-Haul container on top of the car. We said our individual Goodbye’s to friends and family members and kept waving at them as we got into the car. At some point, we stopped waving and looked at each other then drove off together.