article: Why Don’t More Men Take Their Wives’ Last Names?

Who Dares Win

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May come useful when I'll end up in the top 10 european wanted criminals...till then I'm fine with my own.
 

bat soup

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bat soup

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The whole surname thing goes back to a time when women married into a family and became part of that family through marriage. Since women are hypergamous, poor peasant girls would marry into a rich family and become important. It's only when two rich families came together that they might want to conserve their own family name.

Generally, even in 2021, women are still marrying up. It's very rare that a woman marries a man that earns less than her. That's their choice, but if they make that choice then I think they should recognize their status as junior partners. In any case I don't personally think that relationships work when the woman is leading. A woman that insists on keeping her surname is probably a woman that doesn't respect her man the way a woman should.

In Spain, when a couple get married they keep their two surnames and the children take the two first surnames of their parents. In Arab countries, a woman doesn't change her name when she gets married but the children take the father's surname. So it's not a universal thing anyway.
 

RangerMIke

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I don't know why women don't keep their last names more often. Changing your last name, unless it gives you some tangible benefit, is just a complete waste of time.
 

HaleyBaron

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A few years back, a girl was hitting on me and at the same time, kept saying Im the type of guy who would make his girls take on my last name if I got married. It was an amusing interaction cause I never heard a girl say that to me before.
 

MatureDJ

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The whole surname thing goes back to a time when women married into a family and became part of that family through marriage. Since women are hypergamous, poor peasant girls would marry into a rich family and become important. It's only when two rich families came together that they might want to conserve their own family name.

Generally, even in 2021, women are still marrying up. It's very rare that a woman marries a man that earns less than her. That's their choice, but if they make that choice then I think they should recognize their status as junior partners. In any case I don't personally think that relationships work when the woman is leading. A woman that insists on keeping her surname is probably a woman that doesn't respect her man the way a woman should.

In Spain, when a couple get married they keep their two surnames and the children take the two first surnames of their parents. In Arab countries, a woman doesn't change her name when she gets married but the children take the father's surname. So it's not a universal thing anyway.
I am doing a deep dive into my genealogy, and there is one particular line where forr a few generations c. 1500, men from a French noble family (they were never the first-born) seemed to be marrying into dead-branch noble families (i.e., no surviving son, typically because they would get killed in battle), taking over the father-in-law's estate, and adding the wife's name onto the family surname. The same would happen in terms of a knight's heraldry, which is why you sometimes see heralds with many parts.
 

Georgepithyou

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If men married into royal families, typically the nobles would adopt him first.

It wasn't uncommon actually, it still happens in prestigious Japanese and Korean families where they adopt men into their clans who then change their surnames to that of their wives.
 

mrgoodstuff

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If a woman isn't willing to take your last name that's a huge red flag and I can bet you that marriage won't last long and she'll probably wear the pants in the family (feminist alert).

Just like in dating you want a woman who's willing to follow your program.
It is. I've never seen that be a good situation.
 

Just because a woman listens to you and acts interested in what you say doesn't mean she really is. She might just be acting polite, while silently wishing that the date would hurry up and end, or that you would go away... and never come back.

Quote taken from The SoSuave Guide to Women and Dating, which you can read for FREE.

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