Has anyone else ever been in a position where you don’t want to take your partner’s last name, but you also want to share a name?
My partner and I are in kind of a unique situation — both of us have siblings who share a first name with us (my brother shares my partner’s name, my partner’s sister shares my name). To make matters worse in my case, my partner’s sister, who shares my first name, has caused me a lot of turmoil over the years. She’s well-known where we live and has a reputation for not being very nice, and she’s been mean to me at times to the point where I had to go to therapy and even reconsidered marrying into their family. I really don’t want my full name to become her full name both due to my associations with the name and concerns about confusion between us within our community.
Also, though this isn’t the biggest deal, it doesn’t help that his last name is the type of name someone would hear and go “WOW that’s Italian!” — meanwhile we’re both not culturally nor genetically very Italian (both under 20%, me actually being more so than him). I just don’t feel like I identify with the name at all.
The issue is, it wouldn’t be much of a solution for him to take my last name where my brother also shares his name, our names are each too long to hyphenate (20 letters and 8 syllables together), but we want kids and want to have a cohesive family name.
If you were in my shoes, how would you bring this up with your partner, and what would you do? Has anyone ever done something other than hyphenating, keeping your name, or taking theirs? If so, was there pushback or conflict with family?
