Why I Never Even Considered Asking My Wife to Take My Name

I’m not going to adhere to a tradition that feels designed to cause problems

Image by Walter Rhein

I was married in Lima, Peru. My wife and I met when we were both working as English teachers at a local private school.

When you get married abroad you go through a slightly different immigration process than when you are married in the United States. My impression was that there are fewer legitimacy concerns if you can demonstrate you’ve been a resident of your spouse’s home country for a significant amount of time.

I’ve recently discovered that some people are unaware that there’s no legal requirement to change your name once you get married. The name change is nothing more than a tradition that actually represents an unnecessary expense for a young couple.

From the moment I married a woman from another country, I knew that there would be certain complications. In the back of my mind, I’d been aware that the United States is hostile to immigrants, but I didn’t recognize how hostile until I saw it firsthand.

Nobody enjoys going through any bureaucratic process. Even to get married, I had to gather up a variety of documents, have them validated, get them translated, and produce notarized copies. One of the documents I…