Should I Change My Name?

This post is about encouraging you to think about the pros and cons of changing your name, of understanding everything that goes into it so you can see the road ahead of you with open eyes and understand what potholes and barriers you’ll have to navigate as a married couple. For some folks, they know the challenges, they see the bureaucratic barriers and they dive in anyway, seeing it as an expression of unity in their marriage. For others, the hurdles are too high and the gains don’t outweigh the losses, specifically that of a professional identity they have built over years that would take more time to rebuild with a new name.  I recognize that, for you, there might also be family, cultural, or social weight to this decision, so let’s air that out in this discussion, as well. In doing so, you’ll start hearing other voices besides mine – some of these voices are not members of the Forum. (Just a reminder, exercise professional and personal courtesy if you want to share these stories outside of this space. Send me a note and let’s talk!) This is a space where we can bounce these ideas around in a professional manner without judgment or criticism, but as learners.  Try your hardest to keep that mindset as we start.

Fast-forward past making travel plans, past vows and cake and rings. Fast forward through my wedding to my first week of work after my wedding as a jetlagged traveler, grabbing my uniform from my office locker to get changed for the duty day.  An officer more senior to me saw that my maiden name was still on my combat uniform and, without realizing the inappropriate nature of their joke, teased me that because I hadn’t immediately swapped my name out for my spouse’s name, that they would draft a counseling statement to kick my spouse out of the unit.  Furious and embarrassed, I turned on my heel and departed without saying a word to the other officer. (After my anger cooled, I did confront them.) That interaction showed me that being married and in the military was changing my life.

Let me introduce you to Soungbin and her dual-military spouse, Keith.  They’re both EOD/Logistics officers, currently at the CCC. When they got engaged, they had some serious conversations about whether Soungbin was going to change her surname. For them, it significantly represented their married life together.

Soungbin says,  “Keith and I had long discussions about our names before we got married.  I wanted to keep my maiden name ‘Kim’ somewhere in my full name. My younger sister had gotten married before me and changed her name completely.  It crushed my dad! In Korea, wives do not take their husband’s last names. It’s not [practice] and I saw how it [negatively] affected him. So, [we] discussed it and I brought up hyphenating my last name to Kim-Dugan.  Keith was on board and he decided to change his last name with me. One family, one name.”

Keith reflects on those conversations, too: “For me, it was an easy choice to change my name because I don’t have any attachment to my original last name of Dugan because the family name doesn’t have any heritage to it.  I have a number of friends with Spanish heritage who had the combined last names, and I thought it was an interesting concept. It is also typical in Asian cultures for the women to keep their own last name, and not adopt the husband’s name.  This led me to bring up the idea of combining our last names.”

Ultimately, they decided that, instead of just Soungbin or just Keith changing their name, they would change both their names to a combined surname. The results of this change were, in their words, “a mess.”   Remember how I talked about the process for name change? Well, Soungbin and Keith did just those steps. And it was in those places they collided with some significant shockwaves.

Basically, as Soungbin tells here, things got very challenging for them and ultimately have inspired them to currently go through the name change process again to fix those issues. “We didn’t know at the time that many systems didn’t recognize hyphens so [our request of] ‘Kim-Dugan’ became [displayed as] ‘Kim Dugan.’  For about a year, our names in the military systems were Dugan K. Kim and Dugan S. Kim respectively. Everywhere. DEERS, AKO, Enterprise email, everywhere!” Did you catch that? Keith’s surname became both of their first names in Army systems, their real first names became their pseudo-middle initials, and Soungbin’s surname became their last name.  Pretty disorienting to imagine that happening to you and your spouse as you juggle careers, identification cards, and government database accesses. It was due to these struggles that they decided to take a different route when they decided to have children together. Soungbin says, “When we had our baby, we decided to NOT hyphenate his last name. [Because of all this confusion,] Keith and I are currently in the process to change our last names legally to KimDugan [with no space or hyphen so that it can read the same in all the Army systems].”

It’s important to point out here that the struggles and frustrations that Soungbin and Keith went through, as well as the social judgments that accompanied their decision, are not uncommon. As I shared at the beginning, I too was judged by my unit after my marriage as to why I had not yet changed my name, even before I had a chance to do the appropriate paperwork.   Although it may sound obvious after reading the previous story, there are certainly some downsides to changing one’s name after marriage…but there are upsides as well. Let’s look at them each in turn.

There is significant emotional labor and financial resources that go into changing a name: time and energy (plus government processing fees) for each government office, not to mention the changing of credit cards, mailing address titles, and uniform name tapes.  Some folks decide to change their name in spite of all these steps, doing so deliberately as part of a plan to have children together and all members of the family share the same name, just as Soungbin and Keith said. If we’re being honest, the military is a profession gift-wrapped in bureaucracy, and there is something to be said for having continuity of the same surname.   Here’s a quick aside to illustrate this point, as well as concerns of professional continuity. A few months after I got married, changed my name, and, coincidentally had also had a change of BN XO and S3, I was briefing the majors on a product I, the S1, had built. I forgot that I had built it the year prior, when I had first taken over my job, and had merely made operational updates to it for the briefing. Specifically, I forgot that the slide I was briefing had my maiden name as the POC.  After my briefing ended with the requisite “pending your questions”, I received an earful about using someone else’s work and passing it off as my own. I was completely dumbfounded…until I looked down at the slide again, saw my error, and explained that the name they were accusing me of plagiarism against was my own, my maiden name, who I was when I had created this product. They looked at me, unsure of what to say next. Finally one just said, exasperated, “Lesson learned, LT, always check your POC line”, and dismissed me.  I didn’t know whether to stifle a laugh at the failed attempt at being called on the carpet or to be embarrassed by the tongue-lashing. I had certainly not learned to check my products for maiden names in BOLC! Changing a name is a shift in identity, and I was clearly still associating myself by my maiden name.

This is a great segue to a few other considerations about changing names, whether it is one or both parties. Namely, what else has your name as the old name on it that will require a replacement? Two that I will address in this section are AKO username and US passport.

As a young LT and a newly assigned BN S1, I failed to realize the consequences that I was initiating by changing my AKO Username with no prior planning. In short, while doing so did help with the Enterprise email transition (or so I was told), what I also unintentionally did was strip myself of access to every single foundational database that an S1 needs to be operationally functional. eMILPO? Gone. iPERMS? Gone. Access to do ORB updates? Gone. I was – quite literally – useless for the week it took to pull some strings and walk up to the only person who grants these accesses and practically beg him to help me out.  I was lucky. He was an experienced and helpful NCO in the Brigade S1 shop who knew I respected him and that I had genuinely messed up. He also knew that I would be creating far more work for him by my lack of access than if he took some time to help me out. You would have thought that I had learned my lesson here. Except, I didn’t. You see, around that same time, I had also turned in my passport to be updated…while assigned OCONUS…while planning international travel. One of my mentors had recently been assigned to England and, myself living in Germany, I was not about to miss out on a double-excuse to travel over a long weekend on a plane ride shorter than most Americans drive to the airport.  So bought plane tickets we did…with my married name on them. That’s right, I turned in my passport while in a foreign country and then bought plane tickets with the name on them that required the passport that I hoped, fingers-crossed, would be delivered from the US Embassy in time to so I could fly on those tickets. I’ll be transparent here and also say that my husband and I did the math based on what the passport office stated as their longest turnaround time and backwards planned accordingly. Yes, my passport did arrive, exactly as advertised, and I did not, as I had irrationally feared, get stuck in London unable to travel back to my unit of assignment, and I did not have to explain to my Battalion Commander just how I got stuck there in the first place.   The point of these reflections of failure is this lesson: timing is everything, and in the Army, you should treat a name change like the military operation that it is.

At this point, I’ll bet that you’re cringing at what story of bureaucratic botching of paperwork is next.  I’ve successfully painted a fairly grim picture of executing a name change, although it is not my intent to teach through fear-mongering. It’s true that things can go sour if this process is done incorrectly (by either the initiator or a system technician) or with poor timing. However, I think it’s important for you to hear stories of struggle, failure, and conflict to show that you are not alone in these familial struggles and that it’s completely normal to see this as a stressor in your life.  So why do people bother at all to change their name, why go through this rigmarole? The answer is deceptively simple – emotional connection and social/cultural expectations.

Consider again what Soungbin said previously: “I wanted to keep my maiden name ‘Kim’ somewhere in my full name.  My younger sister had gotten married before me and changed her name completely. It crushed my dad! In Korea, wives do not take their husband’s last names”.  In short, she felt family and social pressures urging her to keep her surname. But, she also found a compromise with her spouse to practice both Korean and American cultural traditions through merging their surnames into one new name. Just as Soungbin’s family would have considered it taboo for her to not keep her name, even in America today, it is an expectation (as I also encountered) for women to change their name. Some men, like Keith, choose to do so, too, for the sake of their family, disregarding the cultural norms around them.  By having a common surname in the military, it can be obvious to onlookers that you’re a married couple (depending on how common the surname). The same logic applies for future children, a common surname can – plain and simple – make certain interactions easier. My spouse and I have noticed and encountered this, even without children, with something as simple as going to the post office or going through US Customs, places where having the same last name significantly shortens your customer service experience.

Another potential advantage is that, for women, there is an implicit social assumption that you have changed your name and therefore, if you do change it, you can just go with the flow and put your time and energy into other professional or personal challenges.  (This logic is arguably only an advantage for women in heterosexual relationships, as Keith began to see this social assumption as a disadvantage as a man who had changed his name to match his wife’s, just as same-sex couples might likewise encounter social resistance with a name change due to marriage.) Therefore, you could make the argument that while there is significant emotional and financial overhead for changing a family name at the start of a marriage, having a common name saves the daily emotional energy it takes to correct someone on what your or your children’s surnames are.  For you, that initial investment might handily outweigh the hassle of clarifications for years to come. It takes time and effort to change your name, but it also takes significant time and energy to be a salmon swimming upstream, going against the current of social expectations. Which decision makes sense for you as a married couple?

Soungbin and Keith both reflected on what it means to them to have incorporated Soungbin’s surname into their family name.  Keith says, “I take a lot of [heckling] because from other men because I gave up my last name. I don’t care because [I don’t value their opinions]. I think you and your spouse should discuss if it’ll be different for you as you go forward, and if they would feel ‘less of a man’ for doing something out of the ordinary.”  Soungbin agrees that their decision hasn’t been popular, but that they made it together, as a couple and for each other, and for her, that’s what matters. “We’ve definitely faced a lot of different reactions to our decision. I’ve met many people who were enthusiastic about it. I’ve also come across people who couldn’t understand why I was so attached to my last name as a woman. The most frustrating part is when people make [disrespectful] remarks about Keith being ‘less of a man’ because he changed his last name [and that’s not the social norm in the US].  I am thankful for Keith’s open-minded response [when I brought up Korean traditions]. He gave up his last name, something society sees as a ‘man’-ly right [in order] to unify our family. It’s unique and I love it!”

Whether you decide to change your name, keep your name, or invent a new one, Soungbin and Keith’s discussion of personal and social expectations at the beginning of their marriage is a great role model to consider for your own family decisions.  Don’t let others pressure you into changing your name if it is against your personal or professional wishes. Instead, let it be a catalyst for a respectful and open-minded conversation between each other so that you can make the right decision as a family, putting your time and energy into what matters to you.