Originally drafted November 23, 2025.

Revised February 13-February 19, 2026.

This is part two of a three part series about the life choices I made many years before I got married (about money, keeping my family name, and not having children) that made my unexpected divorce easier to handle. Since I am talking about a lot of personal stuff in this series, these posts will be semi-paywalled. Hugs and kisses to the seventeen folks who have already upgraded their subscriptions. 

Tomorrow is my court hearing for the dissolution of my marriage. It won’t be official until the judge issues a decree within a few weeks. My attorney sent me a list of questions I should expect to be asked by the magistrate. The list is mainly pro forma questions since we already negotiated all of the hard stuff months ago. 

One of the questions on the list is whether I wish to be “restored to a former name.” Fortunately I never changed my name when I got married. This was an extremely logical choice for me that I never gave a second thought, but seemingly a still unconventional choice for many American women, since almost 80% change their name when they get married to a man. Changing my name was never on the table for me. It wasn’t something I ever hemmed and hawed about, I just knew that changing my name was not only an action I was personally disinterested in, but had strong political feelings about.

Every time I see a wife who changed her name without her husband doing the same, I see a marriage in which the man’s time and insulation from bureaucratic paperwork is valued more highly than the woman’s. In a world in which women’s time and labor is systematically undervalued, this is no small thing and it is certainly not a choice made in completely neutral circumstances. I have always thought choice feminism is bullshit, because choices that uphold patriarchal expectations such as a wife changing her name but her husband keeping his normalizes the default expectation that a woman will change her name when she marries a man.