I’m not changing my last name when I get married

Note: I suppose I should first clarify the title. I’m only 17. There’s no way of my knowing if I’ll get married at all, so the title is quite misleading in its assumption that I will, at some point, get married.

A few days ago, I was in the middle of a Secret Santa gift exchange for one of my extracurricular activities. Somehow, and to be frank I have no idea how, the topic of marriage came up, which prompted a boy to ask me if I would change my last name after I got married.

Now, as per Chinese custom, my mother never changed her last name when she got married. This kind of tradition has been long since abandoned in mainland China (probably for hundreds of years already).

I answered that I wouldn’t change my last name. The boy who asked me responded with, “Ouch, wouldn’t you be a little harsh on your husband?”

Okay, so I didn’t phrase it that way. I just gave him the explanation that Chinese women don’t change their last names. Although I didn’t let it show, it still upset me at a really deep level. If I’d let the conversation continue, it probably would have turned out like this:

Me: Why should a woman have to change her last name when she gets married?

Him: Because it’s tradition.

Me: So was slavery. Does that make it right? Would you change your last name if you got married?

Him: No, why would I?

Me: Exactly, so why should I have to?

If we look at the history of Western marriage, women were referred to as Mrs. [insert husband’s name]. Donald’s Trump wife (whoever it is at this point in time) would be called Mrs. Donald Trump. Think about that for a second. Your entire identity has been effaced because of marriage. You are nobody without your husband, without your marriage. Your entire purpose is to be Mrs. Donald Trump.

Even if it’s just the last name you change, e.g., from Hillary Rodham to Hillary Clinton, you’re still changing your identity and your roots. However innocuous it may seem, it symbolically shows how one person belongs to the other. Males and females, and everyone in between, should be viewed as equals. Couples should treat their partners as equals, not as possessions. As divorce has become a more widely accepted concept, it’s a bad idea to change your last name, whether you’re female or male. You might feel like you’re completely in love with a person, but nobody ever knows what’s going to happen in the future. You can’t be certain that you’ll feel as strongly in the future. So you’ll be stuck with a last name that leaves a bitter taste in your mouth and a bunch of name change fees.

I’m really tired of all these arguments that it makes a family more united if every member has the same last name. I’m also tired of the appeal to tradition fallacies that are thrown around. It’s up to the members of a family, not their names, to unite themselves.

And I know there’s a huge problem that arises when a couple has kids. No matter which last name they take on, it’s not quite fair. If they have hyphenated last names, then they’ll usually just drop the mother’s last name after a while. And what happens when your kids have kids? How long can this train of hyphenated names extend? There really isn’t a definite solution to our poor naming conventions.

Well, there was that couple that took on the last name Awesome. Maybe we’ll all end up doing that in the future. That’d be pretty awesome.