Over the weekend a colleague of mine got engaged (and I thought I had a big weekend when I found out that I had received an A on my Robert Frost analysis). Monday morning she floated into work with an obiouvs glow. It took a matter of minutes before one of my co-workers asked, “All right, what happened?”
“I’m engaged!” she spewed. For the next hour, she gushed about the proposal (he asked while the two were away in New York visiting her sister) and how she was already planning the floral arrangement, the guest list and the honeymoon. It truly was priceless. Then the question was presented: would she take his last name?

“Of course. I have to.”

That stopped me dead in my tracks. She has to? Why? It isn’t her last name. I suppose if she said that she wanted to, she chose to, or she deeply desired to I would not been offended. While I continued to listen to her lavish wedding plans, I could not help but think about her reasoning for taking her future husband’s last name (which by the way is Purnwagon). For the remainder of the day, I kept thinking to myself, ‘It isn’t herlast name, why would she feel forced take it?’ I decided to ask a few of my girlfriends their thoughts and more or less, they all agreed that it was tradition and what they would do when they met their white knight.

A few months, back, I wrote an entry regarding a married couple who had wanted to take each other’s last names. For the woman, it was pain free, expected almost. For the man, it was a court battle. I suppose, I still have the lingering question: why? To my knowledge, this tradition began centuries ago when women were not considered equal to men; they weren’t even consider a step below them. When a woman married, she became her husband’s property. She lost her freedom, her opinions. She even lost part of her identity: her own last name. Taking his on was as a public confirmation that she was his. Do we really want to continue to support that tradition?

I’m just having trouble grasping why a woman wouldn’t want to keep her own identity. Marriage isn’t about two people losing themselves. Instead, it is about two separate human beings, connecting (building that blissful bridge if you will). Does it mean that one should have to lose part of herself? But then again, we do have the right to choose.