I didn’t change my name when I got married. Nor did my husband want me to.

I used to joke that, if I changed it, I wouldn’t be able to re-use my lawn signs in the next election.

That explanation was accurate, but it was far from the whole truth.

The truth is I didn’t change my name when I got married because changing it seemed to me like giving up part of my identity and adopting that of someone else.

I felt like I would lose some of my hard-won independence by bearing my husband’s brand and telling the world that I belonged to him now.

And a tradition that requires women, but not men, to change their names seems to me patently unfair.

If changing one’s name symbolizes an eternal joining, then why do only women do it?

If we’re talking about having the same last name, we should have a debate about which name we’ll adopt.

Among my friends who are my age, most have kept their birth names.

But for some strange reason, friends who are five or 10 years younger mostly have not.

Statistics on what seems to be a growing trend in Canada are hard to come by. Here, no one has to notify the government when they adopt their spouse’s name.

But there is evidence of a changing trend among brides in the U.S.

A 2004 study at Harvard found that 44 per cent of women in that school’s 1980 class kept their birth names. For the class of 1990, it was down to 32 per cent.

Those results are reinforced by polls and by the editors of women’s magazines who earn their pay by accurately reflecting social trends.

Why is giving up its identity — or to put it more charitably, taking on another person’s identity — desirable to this next generation?

I’ve asked most of my younger married friends why they did it.

They say it’s simpler, and no one wants to hyphenate.

It’s true, a hyphenated name can make a kid sound like a law firm.

And you can’t get a hockey jersey with 14 letters on the back.

But, in a world where families come in many different permutations, no one assumes that every child will have exactly the same name as his father and mother anymore.

And that’s the real reason today’s brides are doing it — too much diversity.

Nothing’s stable, predictable or traditional anymore.

Young women want traditional marriages these days.

They want to publicly connect themselves to their husbands in a confusing and unconnected world.

They seem to believe that bearing the same name somehow binds them closer in a world in which so many families are spinning apart.

I very much doubt they’re right.

But if they are — if sharing a last name offers some protection against the many things that pull couples asunder — then it’s high time men started doing it too.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007 at 1:01 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.