On (not) taking my new husband's name...

Midlife marriage is full of compromise - and clarity.

“Will you be taking his name?”

I heard that question at least a dozen times in the month or so leading up to my recent wedding, from the county clerk who issued our marriage license, to the pastor who officiated, to the friends and family who wanted to update their address books to include my new address - and, of course, my new spouse.

The responses to my “nope” were mainly pretty neutral. I didn’t catch a whiff of disappointment or disapproval - if anything, in some cases, the opposite (the county clerk, in particular, enthusiastically repeated several times how much easier the process would be for me this way.) People are mostly curious, and just want to be operating with the correct information.

It’s 2023. I’m my own person, not property. It’s my name. Of course I’d want to keep it.

So why does the decision leave me feeling let down?

When I got married the first time, I took my husband’s name. I didn’t struggle with the decision - if, in fact, it even felt like a decision then. With a baby on the way, a big reason we were getting married quickly in the first place was to solidify the legal recognition of our little family. Taking the same last name as my husband, which would also be the same last name as our child’s and future children’s, felt like the most logical way to do that.

Early in my writing career, I decided to use my maiden name professionally. Since I was writing about my kids and family life a lot, I liked the layer of distance it created between my public persona and my family life. And deep down, I wanted some excuse to use my birth name again. Using it as my pen name seemed like a great compromise.

Of course, it created no small amount of complication, too. Since Francis wasn’t my legal last name, I had to establish my former actual name as a DBA - a “Doing Business As” designation - in order to cash checks and accept payments. When my travel was hosted by clients, often my hotel rooms and car rentals would be booked under my maiden name, not the name on my driver’s license.

As my online presence grew, more and more people simply knew me as Meagan Francis, the name I’d been given at birth, and would then be confused they saw my then-legal last name come up on caller ID. Living in a small town, it was typical for people working in various administrative jobs to already know me by my “public” last name, then to be confused when my paperwork didn’t match.

I tried hyphenating, but that seemed to only created more confusion - particularly with any documents that required alphabetization - and I never fully committed to that approach either, so there were different names all over the place.

By the time I was divorced, twenty years after getting married, I was more than ready to ditch an identity that at that point, I was only grudgingly using for legal purposes. There was a pang in officially separating myself from my kids’ surname, but I was eager for the simplicity of all my documentation to start lining up again.

Nearly six years later, when I found myself faced with the same decision - to take my spouse’s name, or not? - instead of my knee-jerk youthful “of course”, I looked back at all that hassle and came to a just-as-knee-jerk “no way.”

I’ve now used my maiden name professionally for two decades; starting from scratch seems like an incredibly unwise branding move, not to mention the overwhelm of changing all those social handles. Plus, there’s an established media personality with my first name, spelled same as mine, and my would-be married last name. (These are the sorts of things one has to think about as a writer!)

My kids are part of the equation, too. It’s already difficult to no longer share their last name, but to take on a totally new last name that would be shared with stepkids and not my own kids, while distancing me from my family of origin would feel even weirder. Keeping my maiden name feels at least neutral, and a connection to the lineage my kids and I share.

Plus, I like my birth name. I’ve had it for the better part of the past nearly forty-six years, and it feels essentially mine in a way no new name ever could, no matter how much I love the person whose name I might take.

I realize that nobody is asking me to defend this choice. Again, it’s 2023. By now everyone realizes that the act of a wife taking her husband’s last name is based on a patriarchal tradition that many find not just outdated, but offensive.

And yet. The romantic and traditional part of me - the side of me that values outward signs of union, who wants the world to know I’m officially partnered, mated, united, yoked, coupled, cleaved - that part of me wishes it wasn’t all so complicated, that there were some other easy, no-need-to-think-too-hard-about-it shorthand for "we are hereby united as a team”.

Matching couple’s jerseys, perhaps?

My sister has kids with two different partners, later returned to her maiden name, and then kept that name when she got married in her 50s. She and her adult kids jokingly came up Fran-Niel-Moore-Ames, an amalgam of all four of the surnames in play, with which to refer to themselves.

A couple of years ago, at Christmas, I designed them a family crest and embroidered it on a tea towel.

It’s a delightful idea (despite my amateur stitching skills!) and meaningful in their inner family circle, but of course, nobody is putting that mouthful on their mail.

A second, midlife, post-kids marriage means making a lot of tradeoffs, I’m finding. There are multiple sets of kids to consider, established households to disassemble and put back together, long-standing social circles to try merging, even exes to take into account.

In many ways, all those moving parts - which have been in motion now for decades, long before my husband and I even met - create more complications than the blank-slate optimism of a youthful first marriage.

And yet, there’s a new simplicity in all that complication - because at 45, I now know how little most of the details matter. I can be a bit bummed about not sharing my husband’s last name, while still realizing that in the grand scheme of things, it’s not worth getting too worked up about.

And while Eric is a pretty traditional guy in some ways, he’s barely blinked an eye over my decision. This far into adulthood, with a divorce behind us each, we both know from experience that there are things far more foundational to our union that should get the lion’s share of our energy.

Somehow the acceptance that nothing is perfect - not the wedding details, not the marital home, and definitely not the people inside the marriage itself - creates more space to appreciate, honor, nurture, and protect what’s imperfectly wonderful.

So when a friend texted the other day, “What’s your new name?” I impulsively texted back “I’m Mrs. Meagan Francis now.” I followed it up with a laughing emoji, of course - but actually, it felt like the perfect representation of my new reality.

I’m still me, the same person I was when my parents named me almost 46 yeas ago. But I’m different, too, with a new set of responsibilities, a new way of living, and a new identity as a married person. Neither wholly independent nor dependent - but interdependent, with another human who I’ve chosen, and who’s chosen me.

Yes, I still think it would be nice to share a name. But with everything else we get to share, it’s also one thing I’m not having too hard a time letting go of.