Diving in, Name First

“Whatever you do, don’t change your name,” a divorced friend of mine told me after I announced my engagement. “Keep your name and keep your bank account.”

Most advice given to me on the eve of my wedding to Jim was less about how to have a lasting marriage filled with love and devotion, and more about the helpful hints that will make getting out a lot easier. This included keeping all banking separate, continuing to rent my apartment and most importantly, not changing my last name.

I suppose my opinions about changing my name were not much different from any modern woman. I had a career with business cards and a nameplate on my office door. Changing all of that would be a hassle, and quite frankly, unnecessary.

But that didn’t mean I was opposed to altering my other names: first and middle. I was born Melinda Meg Myers. I was never called Melinda growing up and few people even knew it was my first legal name. I secretly wanted to clip Melinda from my name like a bad hangnail. Similarly, my fiancé had his own name struggles as he was born Jimmie Albert Morgan, Jr., and always resented being a junior—a copy—and wished he could be more original, or, at the very least, simply Jim.

My sister didn’t take her husband’s name. But with her, I think it was less about her “being an established and known professional” and more about her husband’s hard-to-pronounce Croatian name. So when it came to me, a precedent had been set. Changing a name for a man seemed a bit too submissive and, as an independent woman, I was worried that marriage would erase me, and, in my place, put us.

So it was decided. I would stay a Myers and he would be a Morgan and that seemed to satisfy us both. But then, a glimpse into our separately named union gave us doubts. My sister had a beautiful baby girl a few months before our wedding. When we saw the baby for the first time through the wall of glass in the maternity wing, I couldn’t get past the shock of seeing her name on her delivery sheet. Upon reading our niece’s name card with her father’s last name, it occurred to us both that we couldn’t call the three of them—my sister, my brother-in-law and their new baby—by one family name. That for the next 18 years my sister (a Myers) would pick up her daughter (with a strange Croatian moniker) at school and it wouldn’t seem as though they were a family. And even worse, when my sister divorced the Croatian, it only made her name seem that much more distant from the daughter she now single-handedly raises.

The moment I saw that name card, I knew Jim and I needed to rethink our post-marital nomenclature. It was apparent that we needed one family name. But the thought of giving up “Myers” made me not only defensive, but also somewhat sad. Jim suggested he change his name to Myers. And though I’m a strong feminist woman, and he’s an extremely progressive man, even I thought that seemed too emasculating. I was overly cautious of either us of giving up anything as a result of our marriage. Then he suggested us taking each other’s names. I didn’t care for hyphens between names—as though one name couldn’t survive without the other—so he suggested changing both our middle names to Myers, and become the Morgan family.

It was lovely. It was more than a solution, it was a gesture. And so it was decided that we would become the Morgans and we would share a middle name, too. Jim Myers Morgan and Meg Myers Morgan. Three names are a mouthful, but it works for Neil Patrick Harris, it works for Sandra Day O’Connor, certainly it could work for us. Plus, it rid me of my useless first name and it freed Jim from being a duplicate.

After we came down from the high of the wedding and the thrill of the honeymoon, however, our name decision became a challenge. Changing one’s name isn’t easy. Especially since he and I were both changing more than just our last names. We first obtained a name changing kit from legal books at the county courthouse. From that kit we created a series of legal documents with excruciating detail explaining the purpose of our name change using language like: “party of the second part, and may it please the court.” We consulted a lawyer. We supplied birth certificates, three forms of ID and the Hancock of a notary public. We paid hefty court fees, filing fees and took hours off of work to make court dates. We each appeared before different judges stating our case, raising our right hand, taking a vow and signing a form that promised we were not changing our names under false pretenses.

To some extent, our name changing process was more formal, more sacred and more definitive than our wedding ceremony, which had been performed outside by a family friend who became ordained online. After the signed orders were stamped, filed in the court system and released in the newspaper, we went to the DMV to get our licenses changed. Then, we took our marriage license, our new driver’s licenses and our court orders to the Social Security office to get new cards, then passports, then credit cards, then the house deed and insurance and medical records and on and on and on. And while most receptionists, insurance adjusters and bureaucrats seemed somewhat put out by my request for a name change, my husband was practically hoisted up on women’s shoulders and given a parade for his vast step in the direction of equality.

My husband and I didn’t entirely think through the consequences of changing our names. I hardly ever introduce myself as Meg Myers Morgan because I’m worried I’ll seem pretentious. As though I deserve to say, and have people remember, three names instead of two. Most retail and health care establishments don’t have an option to enter middle names in their databases and, honestly, it’s a mouthful. But everything I sign, produce or email in my professional capacity as an academic is done with all three names. There was less complication for Jim as he wasn’t trying to push “Myers” as much as I was, but he certainly went to great pains to change voicemail, business cards, and, as a journalist, proudly changed his coveted byline to reflect the sweet shift in his personal life.

Mail is a point of amusement for us because even our closest of friends don’t know how to address the envelopes. We’ve had every variation of Myers and Morgan imaginable—misspelled, hyphenated, reversed and one or both names absent. The simple fact that our loved ones try so hard not to offend us with our names (although we couldn’t be less sensitive about it) makes us feel encouraged in our endeavor. We keep a box in our bedroom full of the amusing renditions we’ve come across in our mailbox—including one recently addressed to both my husband’s former name and his current name, which has apparently found its way onto a prominent homosexual mailing list.

Like our marriage, we work at establishing our names every single day. Correcting misspellings, removing hyphens, trying to explain ourselves to strangers. Our names represent more than just a change in our marital status; they represent the very function and nature of our relationship. Many of my divorced friends, and even some long married friends, warned me against jumping in too deep. To be careful not to lose my self-identity and make sure to always have an escape route in mind. And momentarily, before I ever said, “I do,” I followed their logic. There was no guarantee I wouldn’t end up single again one day and protecting myself up front might guard against inevitable pain.

But in the end, I decided that I didn’t want to be in a marriage that I wasn’t truly all in. So I dove. Name first. Our life is messy; bank statements all jumbled together, our laundry mixing in the hamper, sharing shampoo. But that is how I have to see marriage in order to truly believe in it. All that unionized mess doesn’t take away from the value and distinction of the two individuals within it. I was so fearful of losing who I was, that I completely failed to realize that my spouse could bring out, and complement, parts of me I didn’t know before. That each stage of my life, and of myself, simply builds on the one before it. So, on the occasions that I see my name lined up: my first, my middle and my last—all spelled correctly and with no hyphen—I get almost giddy and slightly emotional. Because my life is summed up in those three little names, and hardly anyone knows how much work it took to get them there.