By Any Other Name... No, Not Really

Potentially inflammatory topic ahead, proceed with caution.


An old high school friend reached out to me today asking for my address, presumably to send a card or a gift, and the first thing she said was, "What's your new last name going to be?"

This is just strange to me, because in my circle of friends, the question has always been, "Are you changing your name?" and not the assumption that the change was going to be made.

Now, I know I have previously claimed on this very blog that I was taking Dude's last name. I even created a new email account of such name. I thought it was a romantic expression.

And then reality set in.

I went online and looked at all the things I had to do to change my last name. Hours at the social security office, followed by endless forms and letters and fees. The one big thing that caught my eye was that I had to turn in my passport for a new one. My beloved passport, that has been the record of all my travels for the last 10 years, issued before the stupid RFID chips were implanted so the government can track you anywhere you go. And seriously, how many travels there were! Foreign visas, lovely stamps from far away lands (literally, I have over a hundred stamps in my passport), a beautiful record of all I had seen and the hope of all I have yet to see, all to be traded in for an empty passport belonging to a person who never existed before. It became a symbol of what exactly a name change would be.

And then the dogma set in after that. I work in technology, a male-dominated field (as most fields are), and I thought about how unfair it was that men never have to worry about changing their names. They don't even have to declare their marital status by using Mister. They don't ever have to worry about old colleagues and friends not being able to find them because they got married. And since technology is such a male-dominated field, it was one more thing I had to overcome to compete with my peers. And I got very angry. I got my degree with my name. With honors! I kick ass at work! I kicked ass at my old job! I did all those things, not this new person with this new last name. And I got angry that the very women in my life who always told me that my gender was not a hindrance, that I was as good or better than my male counterparts, that some traditions are made to be broken, suddenly the most vocal about just the idea that I would keep my name. It was not an option, they said.

It has nothing to do with patriarchy, either. My name is my father's name. Our children will have Dude's last name. My name is my name, and I like it. It's one of those crazy 5-name Filipino but Spanish sounding names. I've had it all my life. It's fun to say. It's also cultural - I'm not even an American-born first generation Filipino. I am a naturalized citizen. I watched my parents sell all of their belongings so that they would have enough money to go to America.

The only thing that's keeping me on the fence at this point is that I'd be sad to not have the same last name as my children. But keeping my last name legally does not mean that I can't use Dude's last name socially. And frankly, I'd want that to be a lesson to my children, that women have a choice, and don't have to take their husband's name if they don't want to.

None of this - NONE - is to say that I pass judgement on any woman who does decide to take her husband's name. Up until very recently, I was completely all for it. Most women do it. This topic keeps me up at night. My emphasis is on the choice.


The point is - I haven't yet decided if I'm changing my name. To be honest, I think it will be a game time decision. I will be staring at the marriage license and I'll say yes I can or no I can't. It's a personal choice that I, and I alone, will make.