Why I Never Even Considered Asking My Wife to Take My Name

I’m not going to adhere to a tradition that feels designed to cause problems

Image by Walter Rhein

I was married in Lima, Peru. My wife and I met when we were both working as English teachers at a local private school.

When you get married abroad you go through a slightly different immigration process than when you are married in the United States. My impression was that there are fewer legitimacy concerns if you can demonstrate you’ve been a resident of your spouse’s home country for a significant amount of time.

I’ve recently discovered that some people are unaware that there’s to change your name once you get married. The name change is nothing more than a tradition that actually represents an unnecessary expense for a young couple.

From the moment I married a woman from another country, I knew that there would be certain complications. In the back of my mind, I’d been aware that the United States is hostile to immigrants, but I didn’t recognize how hostile until I saw it firsthand.

Nobody enjoys going through any bureaucratic process. Even to get married, I had to gather up a variety of documents, have them validated, get them translated, and produce notarized copies. One of the documents I…