Make conscious choices about traditions

Finally, someone writing about this issue in a mainstream source:

http://www.cnn.com/2009/LIVING/wayoflife/11/05/o.change.name.after.marriage/index.html

I'm a firm supporter of women (and men) keeping their last names after marriage. Women changed their last names in the past to designate to which group or clan they belonged, and as we know, everyone has more than one "family" unit. In this case, women upon marriage were supposed to have altered fundamentally in that they were no longer a Miss but a Mrs. and belonged to whichever man they married out of love, necessity, or coercion.

We do not reach modernity by simply waiting for years and decades to pass. We forge our own present and our own future, and part of that requires examining and re-examining all of our practices and customs, as tiresome and tedious as that may be.

Many would argue that sharing the same last name in the family brings the family closer together. Just about the only advantage I can think of in having the same last name for both spouses is that it's slightly faster to suspect two individuals of being a couple. But of course, could they not be brother and sister? Isn't this even more confusing? I don't think it's difficult to introduce your spouse by their first and last name, and people shouldn't have any difficulty remembering this.

Sharing a name definitely does not bring a family closer, nor does not sharing a surname separate them - it's what happens in these relationships that actually matter. My mother's last name is Shuai, and I have never thought of her as somehow less of a relative than my Zhang relatives. It's just a name.

And yet, that name means so much. That's what you are born with, what you grew up with. Your parents (probably) painstakingly decided on a first name that would go well with your last, and then to give up who you are so that it's faster to say "the Smiths" instead of other combinations you can come up with, well, that just doesn't seem worth it to me, at least.

While I do not judge women (or men) who change their last names upon marriage nor do I even dislike it, I simply ask everyone to question their reasons for doing so and to make sure that they are doing it and not simply because it's tradition. If so, they are voting for and in rather subconsciously damaging ways perpetuating something that may not necessarily make the positive of impressions on themselves or their children.