By Any Other Name

Plenty of people agonize about if (and how) they should change their last names when they tie the knot. But few people tackle the problem with the zeal of Caryn Platt ’92 and Paul Helwing in the months before their 1994 marriage. Both were eager to change their names to something different, because they felt it represented a concrete way to show that they were embarking on a journey together. The question was how to find a name that perfectly captured their new union, while also recognizing their pasts as individuals.

First, they tried to tackle the problem through technology; Helwing wrote a computer program to generate new last names based on the letters of their birth names. The only problem was that the program worked a little too well: Helwing tried to print out the results at his office over a weekend and returned on Monday to a 2-foot-high stack of pages. The printer was still running.

Next, Platt bought packages of refrigerator magnet letters, then pulled out four sets of the letters in their last names. They invited a few friends over, mixed up a batch of margaritas, and had their friends rearrange the letters like a high-stakes game of Scrabble. The right combination could result in a name that would be carried forward for generations. Still, although the results were better, they weren’t sure they’d found just the right one.

Finally, with their marriage date drawing closer but no name feeling exactly right, they did the only thing they could think of: they wrote down their favorite names from their previous efforts on slips of paper and literally drew one out of a hat. The winner? Tatelli.

This June, Caryn and Paul Tatelli celebrate their 20th marriage anniversary, and though Caryn rarely thinks about the history of her name, people’s curiosity about it is as strong as it’s ever been. “I tell the story of our name change at least six or seven times a year,” she says. “There aren’t that many stories we tell over and over in our lives. But for [Paul and me], that’s one of them.”

The way people keep or change their last names after marriage in America has long been dictated by tradition. But for many, the change has a powerful impact on their sense of self. Today, it’s not simply that women are opting not to take their husbands’ last names; it’s that couples are choosing from a range of options, from hyphenating to choosing entirely new names. And because of larger cultural changes, a wave of same-sex marriages is opening up the last-name conversation to thousands of people who don’t have the option of following longtime conventions. The conversation is far from over. In some ways, it is just beginning.

The Traditions We Follow — and the Ones We Break

Americans are known for blazing their own trails, but when it comes to last names and marriage, we didn’t start from scratch. Instead, says Grinnell sociology professor Susan Ferguson, we borrowed heavily from Roman traditions. “In middle- and upper-class households in Roman tradition, the father’s name went on the wife, the children, and the servants,” she says. “It showed ownership.” At marriage, a daughter left her father’s household to become the property of her husband’s household. She had no legal identity of her own; taking her husband’s last name reflects this lack of legal status.

And while that history might seem unsettling today, it wasn’t something that previous generations of couples spent too much time worrying about, says Judy Mahle Lutter ’61. “I was very excited to change my name,” says Lutter, who married her husband, Hap Lutter ’61 (now deceased), a year after graduating from Grinnell. “It just seemed cool to have a married name back then.”

That sentiment started changing in the late ’70s with the rise of feminism. Over the next two decades, there was a marked increase in women who chose to keep their own names after marriage. Although research on the topic is limited, the most thorough studies suggest that about 3 percent of women declined to take the husband’s name in 1975, a figure that rose to a high of 23 percent in the mid-1990s. That number currently hovers around 20 percent.

Perhaps unexpectedly, Lutter chose to be a part of this emerging trend. She’d begun to notice that many of her younger female friends kept their birth names after marriage. When Lutter began writing and speaking professionally, she decided to follow suit, adding Mahle back to her name. “I thought maybe I could have the better part of both worlds,” she says. “I wanted to have all three names, because that was part of my identity.”

Her husband, for his part, was supportive. “He wasn’t surprised at all,” she says. “He knew it was pretty much in character with my independent ways.” For Astrid Henry, Louise R. Noun Chair of Women’s Studies, it makes sense that the number of women keeping their birth names has climbed since the 1970s; it’s a function of an array of different factors including, but not limited to, feminism. The average age at which women marry has risen, for example, which means that many women have forged stronger identities with their birth names. A 2010 study published in the journal Names: A Journal of Onomastics backs up this assertion: women who get married between the ages of 35 and 39 are 6.4 times more likely to keep their names than women who tie the knot between 20 and 24. Similarly, many women have professional accomplishments that might slip under the radar if they switch names when they marry.

Although many women are interested in bucking tradition, that doesn’t mean that their husbands are universally thrilled about that decision. Men are far more likely to assume that their wives will take their name after marriage. An unscientific, though revealing, study done by Men’s Health magazine found that two-thirds of male survey respondents would be upset if their wives kept their birth names. More than 95 percent said they wouldn’t take a woman’s last name if she asked him to.

Leslie Madsen-Brooks ’97 and her husband, Pete, didn’t discover their difference of opinion until after their marriage date was set. Madsen-Brooks never intended to change her name when she got married. But when she mentioned this plan at Thanksgiving dinner just before their marriage, he was unpleasantly surprised. “I assumed he would know [I didn’t plan to change my name], because I’m a feminist,” she says. “But there was some concern about that. I realized that it was really important to him that I had his last name.”

She describes her husband as politically progressive, but he is several years older than she is, and he held strong to certain traditions. For him, the naming tradition held real value. Nonetheless, when the pair married in 2002, Madsen-Brooks kept her last name, Madsen.

But she found that the practical implications were difficult to ignore. In the end, she was much more interested in meeting him halfway than maintaining her stance on her last name. Still, she made the change on her own terms. As a Valentine’s Day present to her husband in 2003, she hyphenated her last name from Madsen to Madsen-Brooks. “I pulled out my driver’s license and showed him,” she says of the unusual gift. “It was a small thing for me to stand in line at the DMV and Social Security, but it was a huge, huge thing for him.”

Even when couples agree on what last name to use, family members sometimes weigh in with their own opinions.

When Amy Hagan ’97 and Mark Rosenkoetter ’97 married, they created a name that was a combination of both of their last names: Ketteran. The reaction was muted. Amy jokes that, “some people thought it was just another weird Amy thing,” while Mark describes the overall reaction of family and friends as, “fine with it.” Nonetheless, they each had a sister who was skeptical of the changes.

Other people — including complete strangers — had responses that surprised them. When Mark went to the courthouse to change his name to Ketteran just before the wedding (a practical option that allowed Amy to switch her name more easily after the marriage), the clerk who processed the transaction was delighted by his explanation for the change. “When it came time to pay the court costs, [the clerk] told me she wasn’t going to charge anything, as a wedding present,” he recalls.

Since their marriage, some family members have come around. Mark’s sister, the one who expressed some initial disapproval, is no longer skeptical. “She eventually warmed up to the idea,” he says. “Now she thinks it’s really cool.”

Hard Decisions, Real Consequences

Joy Beck ’96 had always planned to keep her name after marriage. She loved the idea of rejecting tradition, and as an academic she had published research on pediatric psychology under her birth name. She felt connected to her name. And when she got married in 2010, she stuck with that decision.

But when her son, Henry, was born last summer, she had a change of heart. “I thought, ‘I want us to be a family. I don’t want to be the only one with a different name,’” she says. Coming to that conclusion hasn’t been easy, though. When she posted her conundrum to Everyday Class Notes, a Facebook group of Grinnell alumni, dozens of women posted responses about their experience.

“[Making the choice to change my name] is really loaded for me,” Beck says. Reading how other women struggled with the decision to keep their names or change them only exacerbated the problem. These days, she’s feeling mostly settled with her decision, though she has yet to file the paperwork to make the change official.

Tatelli, meanwhile, says that even though she’s generally happy with her decision, she’d advise any couple considering a path like hers to give the name a thorough test drive. For example, she says it’s not necessarily obvious from the spelling of her name how it should be pronounced (tuh-TELL-ee). And many people assume — incorrectly — that either she or her husband is Italian. This assumption, she admits, occasionally has its perks. “When we traveled to Italy, we were treated like royalty,” she jokes.

A hyphenated last name, adds Madsen-Brooks, offers its own challenges. Many computer programs don’t accept hyphens, so she has to remember every time for every company whether she’s in the system as Madsen-Brooks, Madsen Brooks, or MadsenBrooks. “I’ll fill out a complicated Web form and hit submit, and it’ll say there’s an unacceptable character, and I’ll have to fill everything out again,” she says. “It’s a small thing. But it happens again and again and again.” If she could do it over, she’d drop the hyphen and become MadsenBrooks to avoid the hassle.

The consequences of hyphenated names trickle down to the couple’s children, adds Henry. She says she has seen an increase in students in her classroom with hyphenated names. They wonder if marriage could mean a long last name needing a couple of hyphens.

Finding a Path Forward

Many women and some men have been weighing the pros and cons of changing their names for decades, and larger societal shifts are adding new perspectives to that conversation. As states have legalized same-sex marriage, for example, new couples have the chance to weigh their options in a different way. “With gay and lesbian couples, there is no automatic default to ‘Well, taking the man’s name is easier,’” Henry says.

Tim Johnson-Aramaki ’99 and his husband, Flavio da Cruz Resende, say that even on their own, their hyphenated and double surnames were confusing enough — and they weren’t interested in complicating matters further when they married last year. “Between the two of us, we already had four surnames,” Johnson-Aramaki says. “With this name jigsaw puzzle, we never earnestly discussed name changes, although we laughed at the idea of creating the most multi-culti name possible from the pieces.” The pair doesn’t have children, but Johnson-Aramaki acknowledges that they may have to reopen the issue if they decide to adopt.

Ashley Abel ’90 and her partner, Virginia (Ginny) Frazer ’89 chose a different route. The pair got married — though it was not legally recognized — at their church in 1992. (They married legally in California in 2008.) In 1995, they both changed their last names to Frazer-Abel. The decision was both philosophical and practical; neither wanted to give up her birth name, and both were wary of the potential parenting pitfalls of, for example, picking up a child at school that didn’t share a last name with one of them. In Ashley’s words: “Why take chances?”

While Ashley says that there have been plenty of small hassles with the hyphenated name, she’s grown to appreciate their decision over time. “I know people who spend a lot of time trying to get their name to the top page of a Google search, but there are only three people in the whole world who have our last name,” she says of herself, her spouse, and their daughter. “I’m always on the first page. It means we can’t hide in the closet, but that’s not our style.”

The consequences of the choices we make when we choose our names aren’t always obvious when we make them, but they last for a lifetime. The names we’re given and the names we change aren’t just about identifying ourselves as individuals — they’re a small but essential way to share who we are in relation to others. They’re markers of the families we’re from, the families we create, and the people we wish to be. And that’s the reason the decisions we make with them are so weighted. Our names are the tiniest of stories. But they are the stories we tell the world every single day.