Mr. and Mr. __________

Having a sort of family makeup just emerging in this culture, a person has to reason out why they want everything from marriage to joint checking, more so than the average person. They have much less of the cultural, and traditional guidance of expectation (but, on the plus side, without the stain and error of such either, as I've written before).

Another such item that came to mind, though relatively minor, is the surname. I've just kind of come to taking it for granted, but many gay couples we know do debate on this to some lengths, and they come to different ends.

A lot of the choices we've made that could be seen as taking a traditional rout had many practical aspects for us, but strong emotional reasons as well. They make absolute sense, but last names didn’t strike us as important on either level for a long while. In fact, this was not a thought for about our first decade together. But once we knew we would be parents it suddenly became another one of those important issues. What last name would our children have? Would it be okay for them to not have one of our names? It really would be far best, at school, at the hospital, and so on, if we all had the same, to avoid hassle and make our situation clearer.

So we decided we had to do it, but how do two men decide who gives up their family name?

It wasn’t as difficult as it sounds, at least between us.

We first thought about hyphenating… and then thought of our great grandchildren ending up with hand cramps for their possible total of eight hyphenated last names :-). No, we narrowed it down to having one last name.

We then thought to merge our names into something new for us both. We came up with a reasonable mix, one that was already extant and didn’t sound too dorky, and we were set to go ahead with that, a new family name for us both.

After of day or so after that conclusion, and looking at what needed to be done to effect this change for us, R came to me. He decided to take my family name instead. I was surprised and tried to talk him back into the new name plan, but he insisted (and I know I didn’t try too hard or long to change his mind :-)). Such a decision really had to be his though.

And I do feel he graciously let me off easy, but, objectively, he was right for many reasons. To change my name meant far more of a bureaucratic struggle, from business documents to various other records he did not have. There were also other fears regarding the heated marriage debate at the time that made us all having my family name seem best. Still, I know it wasn’t an easy decision, and I love him for it every time he’s hassled at the airport for his name change; they just don’t anticipate such :-).

Fortunately, we’re pragmatic in such areas (though, sure, easy for me to say ;-)), and we were off to court. I expected a battle; again, this is Utah. It turns out anyone can change their name as long as it’s not for nefarious purposes, but, to that end, on the form it asked why we wanted to change his name and we, of course, were completely honest with the court. We explained the whole thing. The judge simply read, listened, gave a quick approval and that was it. No fight. Utah deserves my apology, in places :-).

If only that were the end of it, though. About a month later our exact words, our explanation for why we wanted a name change appeared in the paper, in an article about why people change their names. Oh yeah, that’s public record…