Help! I’m Having an Identity Crisis

My fiancée and I can count the fights we’ve had on one hand, well, that was before this year. As the wedding plans become more concrete, there is one subject we fight about all the time. It’s not the flowers or the guest list. It’s my name.

I have an unusual last name, as you can see. It is very long and very Italian. I hated it growing up because unless I was in Italy, no one could pronounce it. Actually I don’t think it’s too hard if you just sound it out but I suppose it’s intimidating. People see those 10 letters with repeating s’s and i’s and they get scared and just guess, never bothering to actually work through it.

In my later years I’ve come to appreciate my last name. It’s unique, lyrical and I think very pretty. I love that it displays my Italian heritage and I get complimented on it often.

And herein lies the problem: my husband-to-be wants us and any future kids to all share the same surname, to be identifiable as belonging to the same family unit.

My fiancée has a regular English last name and my first name and two Italian middle names just don’t fit with the short, English surname. Frankly, they all sound horrible together.

I did want to have some indication that we were related after the wedding, so I said that I would hyphenate my last name and his. Little did I know hyphenated surnames were one of his pet peeves. After five years together I thought I knew everything about him but obviously he chose to keep this one to himself.

His mother has a hyphenated surname and growing up he hated it. He claimed it was a huge headache when he was at school; no one ever realised she was his mom and it complicated everything from paperwork to signing the family Christmas card.

I know a lot of people getting married this year so I wanted to find out if they were dealing with the issue and what they thought about changing or not changing names. Maybe they’d help me decide what to do myself.

I called my friend Helen Fisher who will marry Andy Testa in October. She didn’t think twice about becoming a Testa. “I don’t think my maiden name is really that special or worth holding on to so I don’t mind losing it,” she said. Andy didn’t care what she did with her last name so it was never an issue. “My whole family is pretty traditional. I didn’t really think about it too much, I just always thought I would take my husband’s name.” Then she added that if she had my surname she would have had a harder time with the subject. Great, not exactly helpful.