Most of us have three names at birth - first, middle and last. When we marry, we have the option of adding a 4th - our husband’s name.
Someone better at math could tell us the number possible variations one could use with 4 names, e.g. first name, middle initial, husband’s name; first name, maiden name, husband’s name, et cetera. Back in the day, consistency was not important.
Now, with TSA requirements (name on ticket must match name on ID exactly) and voter ID laws (name on voter rolls must match name on ID precisely), life is lot easier if every form of ID - driver’s license, passport, voter registration card, etc. uses exactly the same version of your name. (Note that in my state, they form jury lists from both voter reg and DL, so if your name is at all different on those two lists, you get called twice as often.)
So ladies, if you change your name upon marriage, take a minute to think of how you want your name to be reflected on all of your legal identification, and stick with it.
Yes, definitely. Birth, marriage and divorce are the 3 times for name choice without a lot of legal issues and having to publish in the newspaper. I made a mistake and had intended to give up my middle name and make my maiden last name into my middle name but messed up so I kept my first and middle names and adopted H’s last name as my new last name. I do caution folks getting married to put though into what name thely want, so on that front there are few regrets as possible.
I made my maiden name my middle name when I married - both times. In hindsight, I wish I’d never changed my name when I married. It is a PITA to have change one’s license, social security card, voter ID, passport, credit cards, etc. I still have items in my former married name. I kept my married name after my divorce from H#1 so I didn’t have much choice but to change it when I married H#2.
That’s why I never changed my name. We moved two days after getting married and were in Germany about a month later. I couldn’t figure out how I’d redo passports and credit cards without an address. And I didn’t really want to be renamed anyway.
I didn’t change my name either. It’s just SO much easier and I like my name too. My mother disliked her middle name and turned her “confirmation name” into her middle name. I never did learn what her original middle name was. She dropped her maiden name completely, which was pretty unusual when she did it. Interestingly, my D has been asking both sides of the family about our histories, and has decided she likes her great-grandmother’s very Italian maiden name so much she plans to add it legally when she is 18. I don’t think she’s the type to ever take her husband’s name. She might try to get him to take hers, though!
When I got married, I took my husband’s name, with the intention of continuing to use my original middle name.
Several years later, I moved to another state, which issued me a driver’s license with the first letter of my maiden name as my middle initial instead. I tried to get it changed and was told that this was very close to impossible and would require lawyers and a lot of money. So even though I didn’t want it that way, my maiden name is now my middle name.
I’m glad I took my husband’s name, though. My maiden name had an apostrophe in it, and I had endless trouble filling out forms because of it. Among other humiliations, I had to raise my hand at the beginning of the SAT to ask how to enter my last name on the form, and the proctors had no idea what to do! I’m lucky I ever got my scores.
I have an unfortunate first name that I have never used. It is on nothing but my driver’s license. (Not even on my passport.) I was told the same thing by the DMV - that the only way to get rid of it would be to go to court and have my name legally changed.
It’s things like this that make me so happy that I didn’t change a darn thing about my name when I married.
@Marian I get the apostrophe thing. Right there with ya but I’d personally rather deal with the apostrophe than changing it.
Changing my name was never in the picture. Wasn’t going to happen. I did push a bit for Mr. R to change his name but honestly, I don’t want to put him through this.
My maiden name is an unusual one and I didn’t want to give it up. It’s now my middle name. I thought about hyphenating it with H’s name but the computer cut it off. And while it didn’t influence my decision, you won’t believe the comments I heard from HIS side of the family!
Both of my parents have middle name issues. My dad’s middle name has two common spellings and his middle name is neither of them (it’s a combination of the two that I’ve never seen before). My mom’s middle name is really one thing but on her birth certificate, it is the Spanish equivalent of that name. But her SS card, ID, and everything else has the correct (not birth certificate) spelling. Only a one letter difference. Both of these cause issues when it comes to documents sometimes. When we were just doing house selling paperwork, we had to correct their middle names on about half of the documents because otherwise it wouldn’t process correctly- despite only being a letter off!
You would think that after all this time, we could make the system at least a little more effective in dealing with minor things like this.
I originally planned to see if I could keep my maiden name as a second middle name, as I didn’t want to part with it and my middle name is very sentimental in the family, but I didn’t partly because I knew every form I ever filled out again would be more complicated and people would constantly get my name wrong. So I kept my first and middle and just changed my last name. I have no regrets, I feel no attachment to my maiden name anymore. We are a new family now with a new name.
It really was not a big deal to change my name… I had to change my social security card and drivers license, my bank account, a few credit cards, my student loans, and that was about it. My voter ID and my address were on the same like two line form, took me three seconds. I still need to do my passport, I’ll probably never use it again so I wasn’t in a big rush and never got around to it. I guess if you are older when you marry and have all sorts of assets and accounts and things to change it would be a nuisance, but for most young people I don’t really see it being such a headache. To each their own, I fully support not changing it if you don’t want to, but it’s really not that big of a deal for the average person. People with published works under their maiden name, or established reputations in their career, or whatever, of course that’s different. Nobody ever died spending one afternoon waiting in line at the DMV, that I am aware of…
I’m kind of old school - I went from Firstname Middlename Maidenname to Firstname Middlename Husbandname. To me, my middle name is still my middle name, it doesn’t disappear. But I don’t really care what other people do on this at all, to each her own I also went from a middling maiden name to a much nicer husband-name, so that certainly influenced things!
When I moved back to Indiana from California, the BMV would not accept my driver’s license because it had my first name as an initial and my middle name listed (as I went by my middle name). Even giving them a marriage license didn’t work, so I had to pay for a name change. I took the opportunity to switch my middle name and first name and used my husband’s last name. If he hadn’t had a much nicer last name I would have just kept my own last name.
I was glad to give up my maiden name. I was tired of people saying, “what?” whenever they heard it the first time. And, spelling it was another nightmare. The first two syllables are spelled the same so people would think I was just repeating myself.
That said, H’s last name is not without its challenges. Too many vowels, and slightly similar to a woman’s name, so I often get called by that as my first name (Think Tierry).
My maiden name, which is a mouthful but by which I was known professionally, became my middle name. My Dh’s last name is easier to deal with, so I took it.
Everyone I know in my parents’s generation used their maiden name as their middle name and lost their original middle name. I told dh we could both change or hyphenate names, but he definitely had papers in his name! One friend of ours the guy added his wife’s maiden name as an extra middle name which I thought was rather sweet though it’s all kind of a mouthful. Luckily his last name only has one syllable and the rest have two.
I kept first my last name and never had a middle name. So I am first name, maiden last name. Kids have hypenated my last name-husbands last name. At first it drove me crazy when folks got it wrong, now I could care less. I get called Ms his Last name, he gets called Mr. my last name, and both last names are reversed to his name-my name. I don’t care anymore. If I had to do it over again, I might have thought twice about hyphenating the kids last names, but probably would have done the same.
I also went from a middling maiden name to a much nicer husband-name, so that certainly influenced things!