Once, it was the norm for women to take their husband’s name when they got married. No longer. It’s gone badly out of fashion: a new survey suggests that only 35 per cent of women aged 18 to 34 plan on following this tradition, with 24 per cent saying that they’d prefer to keep their maiden names. What about the remaining 41 per cent, you might wonder? Well, unfortunately there are other options available to them.
Double-barrelling, for example — something previously used by the upper-class out of habit of accumulating too many things — has now gone mainstream. No longer a status symbol, it is an option for anyone wishing to thread two surnames together by way of a hyphen.
While this is everyone’s prerogative, what happens to future generations? What if one double-barrel person marries a fellow double-barreller? Will they double barrel their double-barrelled names and create some kind of maniacal quadruple-barrelled name? Or will they mix and match names to double barrel?
These are the kind of quandaries that keep me awake at night.
Or, there’s the devil’s option: name blending. Name blending, or “meshing”, is when you franken-stitch two names together to create an omnishambles.
We need to put some rules in place before everyone runs amok with 75 last names
I’ve seen it once before in my own life and it was, as one might imagine, a bit of a car crash. Dawn O’Porter is another example of this, adding a jaunty O’ to the beginning of her surname after marrying Chris O’Dowd, to add a strange Irish twist. And, while I’m not saying that a good name mesh can’t be achieved — like bald men in wigs, there are very few scenarios in which this can be pulled off elegantly.
Personally, I took on my husband’s name when we got married, but I still use my maiden name professionally. I’d like to say that this was for some kind of feminist reason, but it’s mainly just so that I can tell embarrassing stories about him online without them being easily traced back to him. Luckily, however, my husband had a respectable, normal, surname that worked with my forename — but sometimes that isn’t the case.
For too long, women have faced the emotional turmoil of inheriting the terrible last names of their husbands. It’s only right, in this day and age, that we shouldn’t just expect women to take on Handcock or Shufflebottom, and accept that as their life sentence without protestation.
It’s well overdue that society accepts that people have a right to choose their last name, but equally I feel someone should be monitoring the situation before it gets out of hand.
We need to put some rules in place before everyone runs amok with 75 last names. I can’t be the only one who barely remembers what they had for breakfast — it feels cruel to expect us all to recall an entire batch of newly invented surnames.
I know that Keir Starmer has a lot on his plate at the moment, but he must have a spare person in a cupboard somewhere who can regulate this.
Eildih Dorgan is a freelance journalist
