[Sparkle]

I am engaged and I will not change my name when we marry.

I don't feel any pressure or sense of obligation to change it or NOT change it.

My decision to not change it is not tied to my feminist principles or my beliefs about the butch/femme dynamic or my desire to queer-marriage. It's nought to do with politics or legal rights.

My reasons are *all about me*

My surname was given to me by my adopted, abusive father when he married my mother, and he got it from his deadbeat, abusive dad before that, it does not have personal significance to me in a family/genealogical sense.

In fact, for many years I considered legally changing my surname to the original one on my birth certificate (my mother's maiden name) because that family name does have significant personal meaning for me.

But after a lot of time and thought, I chose not to because I decided my name is MY name. I've earned it. I've grown in to it. I've made it mine. No genealogical strings attached.

It is, for me, a symbol of my journey to learn who I am, to be who I am, and to love myself as I am.

And that is one of the reasons I will continue to keep my name when I'm married.

I also have a mother who has done the great name shuffle her entire life, and for me, that process has embodied of her lack of sense-of-self, her lack of having a personal identity separate from her husband. When she married husband #3 she decided to revert to her maiden name, having already taken two husbands' names before that, I had hoped that it signaled a shift in my mother away from her co-dependent patterns, I wished it meant she had found a sense of herself again. Sadly it hasn't meant either of those things, but that's her work - her journey - hers to figure out. I feel fortunate to be able to see and understand that about her and to have taken very valuable lessons from watching her journey.

And so another reason it is important to me, to keep my name (and my partner his), is because it symbolizes, for me, two whole and complete individuals joining together in a partnership for life.

Not the melding or merging of two-to-one which traditional marriage ceremonies and rituals seem to be so fond of. Not the "you complete me" romanticism we (general we) were raised to believe in.



Though I should add that Hack does call me "future Mrs. D*", colloquially and playfully, and it makes me smile. He also calls me his "Old Lady" because I love the television show 'Sons of Anarchy' - that term of endearment I like not so much. :P