As Juliet famously opined in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, “O! be some other name: / What’s in a name? that which we call a rose / By any other name would smell as sweet.” So, it seems, many women feel when they marry and take their spouse’s last name. The taking on and leaving behind of names seems frivolously decided by so many. My partner, and many others participating in a modern reinterpretation of marriage, decided instead to eschew the giving and taking of names–preferring instead to create a name for their new union. Each partner adopting a new name provides a symbolic equality to the couple; one does not relegate their identity to the other’s.
Having been one to greedily take on a new name in marriage and shed the 11-letter Slovak name for a 9-letter German one, I then found myself in a quandary after divorce: did I want to keep my ex’s last name, take back my maiden name, or create a new name for myself? Keeping my married name meant having the same last name as my kids, which seemed important–at first. Then, as their father remarried and his new wife took his last name, the need to no longer be mistaken as his wife became paramount. By this time, I was contemplating marriage to my partner, whose parents had avoided the whole name-swapping conundrum by hyphenating her last name with both of theirs. Not wanting to don yet another hand-me-down cloak, I wanted our commitment to one another to be cemented with a new name for our family, one we created ourselves and one that spoke to who we were today, in the here and now and happily ever after.
Figuring out what that name would be was a much more difficult decision. Both of us wanted an ethnic last name to keep us tied to our heritages. Hers: Ashkenazi Jew; mine: Arabic Christian. I researched Persian last names before and after immigration; I climbed the family tree looking for a prototype. I played with her last name too, researching different etymologies and evolutions through the centuries. Finally, after two years of contemplating marriage and commitment and ceremony and names, I found it. A derivative of my love’s father’s last name, both a Yiddish and Aramaic word that eventually became a renown Latin phrase, it means “I hope.” And since finding her allowed me to do just that again, after I thought I’d lost all, it’s absolutely meant to be.
(mostly) full disclosure 