California

When planning your wedding, as a woman in our society, you get to contemplate whether or not you will take your partner’s name.  Some women have known all their lives that they’d be transitioning along the way, others have watched friends’ adventures as they hyphenated, kept their own, or invented new names. Some guys are very giving on this issue.  My stepsister and her husband BOTH hyphenate.  We have another set of friends where the gentleman (he’s the real deal, you’ll see) took his wife’s name so that her family’s line would not die out. Oh, that’s nutty, crunchy California, you must be thinking. But no – they are in that bastion of old-fashioned traditional behavior, Mississippi.  A gentleman indeed.

So what to do? I spend a lot of time in this space talking about not following the crowd, and respecting your instincts as you make decisions about your wedding.  I’d like to think that if you replace the word “wedding” with the word “life,” most of the advice can be extrapolated, since it’s mainly about being who you are, and trusting your choices.  This decision requires you to flex those emotional muscles in the most literal way possible, and to think hard about what you need to “be yourself.” One thing I know: it’s not all in a name. Not by a long shot.

Be well, and love well.

Dinah