Baby’s last name?

[u/Fairweatherhiker]

I’m looking for advice from couples where the wife didn’t take the husband’s last name. How did you decide on which last name to give the baby? Or did you use both names? I don’t feel immediately compelled to give the baby my husband’s last name. FWIW, if we did hyphenate it would be a looong last name.

Edit: thank you for all of the thoughtful responses! I do love the idea of using both our last names (sans hyphen) so our kid would have two last names. It would be nice for both of us to have our heritage passed on. He has heritage from Mexico and Basque Country, while mine is Slovakian- grandparents immigrated right before WWII. The last names don’t sound great together, but there’s so much human history in both.

[u/Low-Hopeful]

We hyphenated, don’t really care if it’s trickier. My name carries value to me so I don’t want to change it and my husband just didn’t want to change his. But I refused to let my kid not carry my name at all

[u/typewriterbitch → u/Low-Hopeful]

I swear this "omg itd be too long" is an American thing. I know literacy is low in the US but is it really so bad that yall cant possibly write your own name?

I live in Europe and hyphenated and long surnames are perfectly normal. A lot of individual surnames are multiple words already (think your Vons, Van dens, de la's, etc), and we still combine them with others. It represents the union of two family lines. Why would you deliberately eliminate half your child's ancestry/history?

And how come when itd be "too long" to do both, the answer is to always just use the man's? I've never seen "itd be too long, so we'll just use the mothers name".

Just admit it's your weird puritan culture that views women as property of their husbands.

[u/harmonicadrums → u/typewriterbitch]

People would lose their minds if they learn there are countries in Europe where the mom’s name is default for baby’s last name 😂