I ran into a weird conversation about taking your spouse’s name when you get married. I don’t know why it caught my eye, since I’m not married, and I’m not considering getting married. And that’s a decision that’s long since made, anyway. I have a strange fascination with relationships and gender.

I can’t imagine changing my name to match someone else’s. And that’s not a recent development. It’s not something that kicked in the first time I saw my name written on a diploma or a business card. It’s a long-term thing. (Yes, I know. Yes, I’m still on the fence about pen-names.)

I also can’t imagine having someone else change their name to match mine.

Now, that’s one of the things that came up, once upon a time, with a boyfriend of yesteryear.  I had mentioned that I wasn’t going to change my name. And he–being moderately liberated and slightly more than a little impulsive–informed me that he would change his name, because he wanted us to have the same name.

(Conversation re: since when are we getting married? Did I miss something here? omitted for brevity.)

I don’t want us to have the same name.

I’m really not sure what bothered me more, back then. The concept that someone thinks it’s just dandy to “take” your name, or the idea that someone thinks you should “give up” your name. Two sides of the same coin, maybe.

**shudder**

I don’t know what that says about me, either.

What it says about him is that he has gone tiptoe-ing off into the sunset.

I’m always leaving the names to last in my books. (And I may have gotten through the one I’m revising now without naming most of my main characters at all.)

My current mc comes from a culture where people have dozens or even hundreds of names that just sorta… get stacked on top of each other as the individual earns them. So, working out from the family name you got when you were an infant, and proceeding all the way to “Handsy Old Guy in a Home.” Or… you know… something name-like. You get married, and your spouse gets to add one. Why not? It’s one more on the list.