Hyphenated Last Names

Now, I’m all for women’s rights and equality between men and women and all that good stuff, but when it comes to last names I am a fervent objector to hyphenated last names. Ladies (and the select gentlemen to whom this applies), when you get married, you basically have three choices when it comes to your surname:

a)    Keep your own last name

b)    Replace your middle name with your maiden name

c)    Take your husband’s last name

There’s also a potential fourth option, but we’ll talk about that later. To address each of these in detail:

Keep your own last name – in my opinion, this option is for successful women whose name is already a brand or established in their industry. For example, if Oprah and Stedman ever got married, Oprah would never change her last name from Winfrey to Graham (frankly, Stedman would be better off if he changed his last name to Winfrey, but that is another story). In this scenario, a woman could also keep her name publicly, but change her name privately. I’m not sure what good that does, but I know it’s done, so I’m just putting it out there.

Replace your middle name with your maiden name – this option appears to be getting more and more popular, especially on Facebook. I think this is so that if people search for you, you’ll still come up in their search results. I think this is a very nice compromise if you feel a strong need to retain your last name, as it allows the woman to honor her family’s name while at the same time acknowledging the marriage to her husband. This option (and the next) is very helpful for when the woman and her husband have kids. Kids can get confused when their mom has a different last name, and this can be confusing when mothers pick their kids up from school as well. But if you’re dead set on keeping your last name, I won’t judge you too much for choosing this alternative.

Take your husband’s last name – for me this is the preferred option, because I think it makes things easier in the long run. After you’ve gone through the (mildly annoying) process of legally changing your last name, you’re done and don’t have to think about it anymore. And again, you have the same last name as your children, which I think is very important.

The two main reasons I’m specifically against hyphenated last names are:

a)    They can be really long

b)    At what point do they end?

For example, my previous roommate had a last name with 10 letters in it. If she got married to a person with an 8-letter last name (which her cousin did), this family would have 18 letters in their last name (19 characters if you count the hyphen). This is incredibly annoying, both from an introduction and signature point of view. “Hi my name is Mary Gregonning-Hamilton” is quite a mouthful, and my hand is already hurting at the idea of signing that beast on every credit card receipt that comes my way. Not to mention, there are several nationalities where the people typically have looooong last names (I’m looking at you, Russia and Laos)… could you imagine having a hyphenated last name with 30-40 characters? No. The answer is no.

Additionally, at what point does the combination of names become too much? If Mary Gregonning-Hamilton marries John Armstead-Jenkins, are they going to become Mary and John Gregonning-Hamilton-Armstead-Jenkins? I don’t even know what would happen in this case, but I’m pretty sure that if I were Mary that I would just suggest to John that we both change our last name to Jones or Smith or something equally short.

The creative fourth option that I alluded to earlier involves merging the woman’s and the man’s last names together. A famous example of this is the current mayor of Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa. He was born Antonio Villar and his wife Corina Raigosa, so they combined to become the Villaraigosa family. However, there are a couple issues with this as well:

a)    Not everyone will be so lucky that their last names match up so well (Seriously? One person’s last name starts with R and the other’s ends with it? Fortunate circumstances indeed.)

b)    This makes researching family trees much more difficult both for current and future generations.

c)    If you are Corina, what do you do when your mayor husband cheats on you with a slutty, ladder-climbing reporter? (aka – if the unfortunate circumstance of divorce enters the picture, do you go back to your original last name or keep the one you’ve made with a person you’re no longer with? And if you enter another relationship, what do you do with last names in this instance? Combine the last name you fabricated with someone else with your new partner? That’s weird, like a name ménage a trois or something.

Sadly, few people in the world can get by on their first name alone (not that I’d want to, since your first name has to be really odd in order for it to work – think Madonna, Cher, Beyonce, Prince), so they have to go with one of the above. Please, go with b) or c) to make things easier for everyone. I know I will, the last name Crankypants does not need to live on to the next generation.