I Got Married and I Didn’t Change My Last Name.

I got married last year and I didn’t change my last name.

I hesitated to write about this publicly. It felt odd to consider “announcing” a lack of a change. Yet, not changing my name is a counter-cultural decision, and by not addressing it, I’ve been called the wrong name several times in the last year due to the assumption that women will take their partner’s name. And that cultural expectation is the reason I want to write about it. 

I can’t think of a single woman I know personally who hasn’t made some adjustment to her name post-marriage. In America, around 80% of women will take their husband’s last name. Over 90% of heterosexual men keep their name. That’s a strong cultural hold. There’s not much in America that shares that high a participation rate. Given that a majority of heterosexual couples will follow this traditional route, I want to offer my voice and reasonings for opting out. I want to illustrate that people can choose to do things differently if they want to. 

When a tradition is so widely adopted by society, it can make something that is a choice feel like a given. We may intellectually recognize that a name change is a choice, but how freely can a choice be made when it is so heavily shaped by a culture with a bias towards one particular pathway?

Here are the reasons that shaped my decision to keep my own last name, no changes, when I got married. 

Reason 1: I didn’t want to.

My gut reaction to the idea of a name change is I don’t want to. And that’s reason enough. I could stop writing this piece right here in acknowledgement that not wanting to is a sufficient and comprehensive enough answer to “why don’t you change your name?” But, I won’t stop for the sake of sharing my thought process and providing background to why that lack of desire exists. 

I’ve known I wouldn’t change my name for a very long time. At age 14, I announced to a group of friends that I wouldn’t change my name if I got married. I cited that I had always signed my artwork with my first and last name and didn’t want to lose that association with my art by changing my name later on. When my (male) friends scoffed at this and asked “what if your potential husband doesn’t like that?,” I retorted that he’d have to deal with it or I wouldn’t marry him. Small Brooke was certainly ambitious about the value of her signed artwork and surprisingly already in alignment with egalitarian relationship values I hold now despite not having the language or experience to grasp that at the time.

Reason 2. My name is my name.

This is the strongest reason that informs why I didn’t want to change my name. It’s as simple as Brooke Bowlin is who I am— always has been and always will be. I don’t have a strong ancestral attachment to my name. My family doesn’t have some long history of pride in “being a Bowlin.” Actually, I don’t know much about my family lineage beyond two generations back. I have no attachment to my name other than it’s my name. It’s my identity, serving as a representation of every version of me, as varied as those versions may be.

My partner dated Brooke Bowlin, so he is gonna be married to Brooke Bowlin. 

The idea of changing my name because of another person’s existence in my life didn’t sit well with me. Our union doesn’t signal becoming a new person. While we certainly shape each other, we don’t fundamentally change who the other is. I feel no resonance with the hypothetical combination of my name with my partner’s last name. Brooke with any other last name is a stranger to me.  

Reason 3: The paperwork. 

Even if I felt completely neutral about the idea of changing my name, the hassle of the paperwork would still stop me from doing it. The process of legally changing your name and then updating all your identification, information, and accounts sounds like such a headache, yet we just expect women to take on this burden. 

Reason 4: Just because something is “always” done doesn’t mean it’s right for you. 

A name change is honestly a really big deal. Yet, we don’t treat it as such when it comes to marriage. So many women go through the motions of changing their name without even considering otherwise since it’s so ingrained in our societal expectations. It’s just what you do. Little girls grow up knowing this is the case. Consider the classic middle school daydreaming practice of combining your name with your crush’s last name in your notebook. It’s so clear that women changing their names after marriage is one of those cultural traditions that we all just stick to. 

Yet, it doesn’t take long to find a litany of women who regret doing so. Take these reflections from Jackie for example:

“[G]iving up my name wasn’t something I truly chose. No one forced me to change my name, but I was conditioned to believe it’s something a wife just does — so her husband doesn’t feel slighted, and her kids don’t get confused — based on traditions that go against everything I believe in.” 

Many women express discomfort with leaving their names behind, citing feelings of loss, regret, lack of alignment, and lessened autonomy. Women talk about how their new names didn’t feel right or that it took a long time to get used to. It’s no wonder that women often don’t realize how they would feel about the name change until after they do it. Because our society has adhered to the tradition of women changing their names in such strong numbers, we don’t even allow ourselves to consider it as a choice we can weigh up front before it becomes a regret. Women change their names and deal with the fallout later. And sadly, many women who do regret their name change rarely change it back because the burden to reverse it feels greater. If we actually treated marriage name changes as a choice everyone can freely opt in or opt out of rather than a tradition or a given, men and women would have the space to decide if a new name is right for them or not.

It’s important to note that there are many reasons to change your name that aren’t inherently related to marriage such as wanting to detach your identity from an abusive or absent parent and family of origin. It’s up to you to choose whether a name change, at any time in your life, is right for you. Tradition doesn’t need to play a role. 

Reason 5: Women’s identities shouldn’t be overshadowed by men’s existence in their lives. 

What does it say about our society that we change how we address women after marriage but not men? Just as I haven’t changed my name, I don’t use marriage-related identifiers like Mrs. or wife. We don’t change how we address men after such a life change, so I’m not interested in changing my own identification simply because I chose to partner. 

As Jackie noted above, we expect a woman to change her name for the sake of her husband and potential children. Not her own. Women are expected to change their names so that there can be a unified identifier within the new nuclear family created by that marriage. But if a couple having the same last name as their children were the only concern when considering a name change, you’d imagine there’d be more men taking women’s names (afterall, it’s highly unlikely that the man’s name is always the preferable one). Yet, men rarely make that decision. It’s women who have to sacrifice and consider other people in a decision about their own name that they have to live with daily. This speaks to the foundational nature of society’s preferential valuing of men.

The tradition of women changing their names is rooted in patriarchy. In America, the need for women to change their name can be attributed to coverture practices during our founding, though we borrowed them from European common law that existed centuries prior. Coverture was the legal practice that denied women their own identity. A woman’s legal standing was covered by her husband’s upon marriage and taking her husband’s name was a natural consequence of this. Under coverture, when a man and woman married, they became “one.” And that one was the husband. With no legal standing, women couldn’t write contracts, sue, work for their own gain, own property (unless written workarounds were employed and approved by the man), or even have bodily autonomy. Over time, aspects of coverture have eroded and various laws have been written to address and abolish parts of coverture, such as the Married Women's Property Act of 1847. While coverture started to be dismantled in the 19th century, it still had lasting legal impacts dating as recently as the 1970s and 80s (and arguably still today). 

In 1975, it was officially legal in all of the U.S. that a woman could freely choose to keep her last name when getting married. Despite the roots in patriarchal ideals that essentially viewed women as property, taking a man’s name still has the dominant cultural hold almost 50 years later. It’s worth noting that, for many, the tradition of a name change is more associated with the cultural attitude of familial ties and desire to create a unified family identity than its legal roots in property ownership. This isn’t to imply that women changing their name today are complicit in the patriarchy. But I do think it’s a symptom of a society that still prioritizes male preferences. While women may not fear legal repercussions for this decision anymore, women may experience relational or cultural pushback. 

While I know my own decision to keep my name was (and still is) right for me, I dreaded that my decision would feel insulting to my partner’s family and that I’d have to continually defend myself for making a “selfish/hyperfeminist/anti-biblical/whatever offense someone may take” decision. I’ve practiced many arguments in my head that I’ve, surprisingly, never had to use. I’ve not faced any pushback (to my face, at least) on my decision (I suspect my traditional family secretly relishes that I kept their name). For some women, the idea of having to defend their decision and risk offense may leave them opting for the cultural norm.

While I never worried that my partner would have a problem with my not changing my name, many men would. Because of the cultural buy-in, a man may interpret not taking his name as rejecting him rather than rejecting the practice. After all, if all these other women are doing it, why can’t the rest of us just fall in line? One study reports that some men view women who don’t take a man’s name as less committed in the relationship and think those women should be held to a higher standard. Our patriarchal society has primed men to be catered to and that, of course, his name and his desires should be the default. Add the potential backlash women will face to the list of reasons why a woman may choose to just follow the norm and change her name. 

Thankfully, my experience with my partner in this decision was frictionless (I suspect this is rare). This is how the name change conversation went with my partner:

Me: “I’m not gonna change my last name.”

Him: “I figured. I wouldn’t change my name either.”

And that settled it. Neither of us had a desire to change our names, whether that be taking one of the other’s, hyphenating, or combining names. We both made our own decision on the matter and it was straightforward— barely even a conversation. Our stances were a natural byproduct of our personal identities and our relational dynamic. We didn’t catch the other off guard. We had 5 years of history together at the time to inform how we might approach names and integrating our lives. My 14 year old self was spot on— choosing someone who would take issue with my decision to keep my name wasn’t in the cards for me. 

My hope is that anyone reading this and considering a name change has the same experience— a healthy partnership that will empower whatever each decides. My hope is also that this decision becomes more balanced— that each time a couple chooses to share lives, they can open the conversation to what names they each want to adopt, keep, or combine. 

I don’t judge women who have changed their name, nor do I categorically think women shouldn’t change their names. Rather, I just think names are deeply personal. Therefore, it’s a tradition worth engaging in thoughtfully— one worth choosing consciously. I want everyone to be able to make that choice fully of their own volition, not pressured by society, family, or a partner. 

Notes:

I know not changing my name can make addressing Nate and me as a couple minorly inconvenient or simply bring up questions on best practice. How do you address mail or identify us in conversation if you can’t group us in a shared last name? It’s easy. Just say both names. Don’t refer to us as “the Pearsons” just so you can mention us in one breath. To do so, knowing all of the above, would be to dismiss the decision I made on how I’d like to be identified (while perpetuating the cultural prioritization of male personhood). Additionally, to flip the narrative and refer to us as “the Bowlins” discounts Nate’s same decision to not change his name. Brooke and Nate works just fine. 

If you have called me by the wrong name in the last year, don’t stress it. I trust that you just didn’t know. No hard feelings. I wrote this to invite more people to shift their inherent assumption that women would or should change their names. 

Want to read more?

Studies:

Women’s Marital Naming Choices in a Nationally Representative Sample

Marriage name game: What kind of guy would take his wife's last name?

Hillary Rodham Versus Hillary Clinton: Consequences of Surname Choice in Marriage

Marital Name Changing: Delving Deeper into Women’s Reasons 

Articles:

Making a Name: Women’s Surnames at Marriage and Beyond

Why are women *still* being pressured to take their partner's surnames after marriage?

I Changed My Name When I Got Married & I’ve Felt Weird About It Ever Since

Why Women Do or Don’t Change Their Last When They Get Married

Written November 2023