When I decided to get married, I didn't worry at all about gifts, jewelry or cake. Generously, my husband's large and talented family provided all of these for us.
Instead, my big worry, the one that kept me up for many, many nights, was what to do about my last name.I knew it all along that I was going to stick to my maiden name.
After months of questioning my own feminism, hypotheticals involving hyphenation (what if I did, and my children married other hyphenated offspring? and a fruitless inquiry into whether my husband had any interest in my surname (why should he, he asked, when he said men never took the wife's maiden name and added it to their own?), I decided to use my maiden name for life.
Legally, that is. Professionally, I still use my maiden name.
In social contexts, such as wedding invitations or invites from the local temple, I prefer to use my husband's family name as I am an outsider to his society (I'm an Indian married in Malaysia).
I see my friends and family members where women either simply use the husband's family name or have hyphenated both their family names. Cumbersome. It does not make me a lesser part of my husband's family, nor does it make me any more. I want to be seen as an individual, with my own identity and I want my kids to regard me one with a different history, family background and on top of it all, a wife, a mother and keeping my maiden name has helped in some ways.
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