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Jared Folgel Kelce
(midwest.social)
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
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ill never understand how "married women are expected to change their name to their husband’s" is still a thing in the 21st century
To me, the real issue is that the entire process is one giant double standard which is built on that expectation. At least it is in the US.
If a woman wants to change her last name to her husband's, it's fairly easy. She can just mail a form to the Social Security Administration and use her SS card to get a new photo ID.
If a man wants to change his last name to his wife's, he has to hire an attorney and get a court order.
I guess this is the US of A? Here in a northern European country you get the option when you marry to keep your names, combine both, only keep the husband's or only keep the wife's.
Now that's the way to do it.
In Spain, since the 16th century, the wife keeps her last name, and father and mother last names are used, the order of which can be changed.
Also, after your 18th birthday you can change it to whichever order you want.
I've wondered, though, what happens when the kid gets married and has a kid?
When Juan Acevedo-Rodriguez marries Mariana Cortez-Garza, what is their kid's last name?
Edit: disregard, I should have kept scrolling, someone already answered my question.
Not to detract from your general point, but no, you don't need an attorney to change your name in (at least most of) the US, especially if you have a reason you can put on a simple court filing like "marriage". It is somewhat unnecessarily complicated by paperwork, but you definitely don't need a lawyer and it isn't recommended to pay for one for something so simple.
I know this because I'm transgender and have changed my entire name, and looked up the process in multiple states.
You had to do it in multiple states? Or was it a One State to Rule them All situation? Serious question, by the way.
I looked into the process in multiple states cause I was moving around from state to state at the time I wanted to change it, and while I'm originally from Michigan and would have to go through them for birth certificate changes (so yes, kinda one state to rule them all), the rest of the legal name change process is done wherever you currently live.
Oh, sheesh! That's tough! I hope you were able to get it done and registered and that you are now called by your heart's name.
That's good to know. Still more complicated than it should be but not as bad as I thought.
It’s even worse in Japan, where married women are legally required to take their husband’s name. (There is mounting pressure to reform this, though the conservative ruling party is dragging its feet.)
It’s easier that everyone in the family has the same surname imo
So the kids get double surnames?
Do their kids get quadruple surnames? Where does it end?
The Spanish system is superior:
FirstName(s) Parent1LastName Parent2LastName
To clarify it's the first last name of both parents, and you can choose the order with the condition all children of same parents must have the same order.
Just pushes the issue down one generation…
Parent1 B C, Parent2 J K
...
Parent3 B A, Parent4 J H
...
Child1 and Child2 become Parent5 and Parent6
Parent5 C K, Parent6 A H
...
it seems to work pretty well (ends up preferring people with two surnames, which is an ok amount of surnames)
flamingo said, a couple comments up, that it's the first last name of both parents. So Child1 should be B J or J B, Child2 should be the same and Child3 should hence be B B, B J, J B, or J J depending on what 1 and 2 chose. Right?
The whole system collapses if you have a child with someone who has "chosen" a different family surname order.
I agree with the fact that it's easier for everyone to share the same name, especially when one parent travels alone with the kids. It's such a faff (with good reasons) if you don't have the same.
The issue is more that it's often assumed that the wife has to take the husband's name by default, rather than it being ultimately a choice between the couple.
Well wouldn’t mind if it was the other way around, but I appreciate that there is a rule, so no one gets offended when you ditch a generational name.
Icelandic patronyms like to have a word. You can have a 4 person family and nobody has the same "last name"
Which, like most Icelandic peculiarities, is adorable, but doesn’t scale well, especially with the pool of available names being restricted by the Naming Committee (in Iceland, it is illegal to give a child a name that is not on a list of approved names). With under 400,000 people in the country, and almost no family names, Icelandic phone directories apparently list people’s nicknames as well, so you don’t call the wrong Gunnlaugur Þóraresson by mistake.
Nicknames are not listed, but profession is. However, I find claims of it "not scaling well" to be strange given there are three million "Smiths" in the US and most of which are entirely unrelated.
Also, you can ask the committee to add new names, and they do let quite a few weird ones enter every month.
Here, there is no surname. every name is a given name. Yes, even something like Abdul Juan Michael Obama Pierre can be a full given name of one guy.
Couples I've known who both had double-barrelled surnames before marriage generally combined one of the names from each of their names to create a new double-barrelled name, which is what their new family and kids use. E.g. A-B marries X-Y and they become B-Y or X-A or whatever.
Sometimes, the missing parts of the surname get given to specific children as middle names. Which is a nice way of acknowledging older family members without burdening your kid with an old or boring name.
Wellcome to the Spaniard custom, probably older than your country 🫠
Eh weird dig considering a lot of other European countries do it that way. It's not just the US or Canada.
It's not really a dig on the age and the custom of the US, but a dig on the incredulity with which the system that has been in place for tons of generations in Spain was presented by the commenter. Let me rephrase it, "the custom is older than the US, don't talk about it as if it were an alien concept".
16th century.
where I live, kids still usually take on their father’s name (sometimes the names are combined), but the mother almost never takes on her husband’s name. so yes, usually the mother will be an outlier in her family, last name wise.
i don’t think mothers were i live are less connected to their family because of it, tho
(altho, personally, i still don’t like the fact that it’s expected for kids to take on their father’s name, it feels like a relic of a shitty system better left in the past)
The legal use is 2 surnames, father mother, people can often recite combinations to several generations back, but that is really ancdotic, although it makes genealogy pretty straight forward
Right... As long as people were faithful (90%)
Still works, it's just the DNA that doesn't get passed along.
How? You assign your father as your "father" but your real father is your uncle. Then this wrong info is passed for generations. Where is the error correction term?
In this form, it's as useful as normal Surnames.
I agree it's so much eeasier. It's kinda weird how much stuff gets easier when you just say "that's my wife/husband". It magically erodes a lot of barriers. People rarely check, but if they do they seem to only go as far as making sure the last names match.
I find it weird that it’s an expectation but I don’t think it’s weird that some women like to do it. My wife wasn’t going to change her name, but decided last minute to take my name because she wanted to share a name with any kids we’d end up having and we both agreed we’d want our kids to have my last name. Now we almost have our daughter (our first) and she has no regrets. But I wouldn’t have been upset if she kept her name. She’s got a far cooler last name than me anyway. Maybe I should’ve taken hers. Oh well.
Let's trade. Women can keep their names when they let their sons keep their foreskins.
That's... a bizarre take on the situation.
Rest of the world: wat
Whenever I've had this debate, it's always the men who are pro-circumcision, but go off I guess.
Meanwhile in reality, women are more likely to support circumcision than men.
It makes my work maintaining computer systems a nightmare. Mary Smith changing to Mary Taylor makes my job harder. At least on these CoTS systems, and without notice.
Women and men are both 'expected' to do a lot of various things. I think the main issue is that the average man doesn't care, while the average woman does care and adheres to the expectations.
I see this happen so often with women. They keep following some stupid, made up rules, and then complain about it afterwards. Whereas men will just ignore them. Of course, there are many women who don't have this problem, and many men who do.
It should be noted that affected people are not at fault here. Nobody chooses what personality they are born with. In many cases this is actually a positive trait. So perhaps the core issue is society abusing this characteristic.