Blogger bride dilemma
Posted on October 21st, 2006 by Jackie Danicki
A good friend of mine, a blogger, just got engaged, and she’s not sure she should change her name for professional reasons. Quite frankly, she could lose Google juice with a new last name.
That’s from Jory des Jardins, who just got married and is keeping her name.
Filed under: Blogging, Life, Relationships
I kept mine, also for professional reasons, as my byline was known. Also, because “Nancy Johnson” really only sounds like a woman wearing an apron. And Din (my husband) could care less. All that said: there is a part of me that wanted to, which must correspond to the part of him that pumps a little victory fist when someone calls me “Nancy Johnson.” In any event, when I am referred to as Johnson, I like it. But not enough, I suppose, to legally change it.
Codicil: If we’d planned to have children, I believe I would have. And don’t get me started on hyphenated surnames…
I think that in general, it’s hard for a woman to be in love with a man without wanting to have his baby, and I think it’s that same part of us that - even if we keep our names - doesn’t mind much when people assume we have taken theirs. (That said, I have known some very oversensitive women - the kind who are ALWAYS on the lookout to be victimised - who got really angry if someone assumed they’d taken their husband’s name. Maybe it’s a coincidence that these women also had zero desire to have children. Not that there’s anything wrong with not wanting kids.)
I won’t be known ‘professionally’ (I hate that word) as anything but Jackie Danicki, but I will have the same surname as our children. Double-barrelling is not an option for us, unless we take Antoine’s mother’s maiden name and add it to Clarke, which I think would be a nice gesture.