THE WEDDING PLANNER
It's all in a name

Editor's note: It started as a cathartic way to vent, until she mentioned it to her editors. Now Advertiser relationships writer Tanya Bricking is going public with the Wedding Planner, a Web log with new postings Tuesdays and Fridays.

Bricking is marrying a military pilot who has deployment orders for Afghanistan, so she's going through whirlwind planning as she rushes toward a November wedding.

By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Relationship Writer

We were in line at the video store filling out a membership application when this whole I'm-really-getting-married thing hit me again.

My fiancé wrote his name on the form. Then he wrote mine — or at least my first name, along with his last name.

It felt weird. Not in a bad way, just in a bit of a jolting way.

It's strange to accept my changing identity.

I always thought I would be one of those women influenced by the feminist movement of our mothers. I'd keep my name and be my own person.

Then I decided it would be complicated if we had kids and I had one last name and my husband had a different one and our kids didn't have mine. Yes, it's a predictable bride-to-be dilemma: what do you call yourself once you get hitched?

I knew I didn't want a hybrid name, and I hated the idea of hyphenation. It just seems too bulky. Yet I wondered if my husband-to-be would be offended if I didn't take his name.

I got myself all worked up about how to tell him that after nearly 33 years of the same name, I was having trouble letting go of it. (Kind of like getting rid of our duplicate furniture, but to a greater degree.)

So about a month ago at dinner, I told him there was something I wanted to talk about: what my last name would be after we got married. I was expecting this to be a BIG discussion. I told him I was debating a dual identity: my maiden name at work and his last name in social circles.

And I told him I wasn't even sure about that. Maybe I would make my maiden name my middle name, I said. What did he think?

I shouldn't have gotten myself all worked up, because he said he would be happy with whatever I decided. He left it completely up to me. Small discussion.

Maybe he just wanted out of a complicated decision.

To me, it wasn't just about the logistical nightmare of changing my name on my driver's license, bank records and other documents. It wasn't the threat of high divorce rates. It wasn't even that taking someone else's name seemed slightly subservient and house-wifey to me. It was the idea of changing the way people know me that made me uneasy.

I know this is a non-issue for a lot of women, and I don't know if they just grew up with a last name they were dying to get rid of, or if it's some renewed popularity in traditional values. I can't believe how many of my friends have taken their husbands' last names recently with no discussion about it. But that appears to be the trend.

The Lucy Stone League, an organization named after a woman who refused to take her husband's name when they married in 1855, estimates 90 percent of women marrying today will drop their own name to take their husband's.

I thought that seemed like way too many. Then I read the Alternatives to Marriage Project, an online newsletter dedicated to equality for unmarried people, which also says about 90 percent of married women nationwide give up their last name when they marry.

And, as if I needed a bridal magazine to confirm it, Condé Nast Bridal Infobank last year found 83 percent of first-time brides in their 20s planned to take their husband's name, up from 71 percent a decade earlier.

I know this is just part of the process that career women go through when they get married.

No one is making us surrender our identities or give anything up in feminist terms. It's just another thing to let your mind buzz about. I wonder if the buzzing will multiply when I assume more than one identity.

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