It’s about time to see this silly little concept fading away:
The time was 1972, and I was on my first date with a guy named Gary Mathewes. “The woman’s liberation movement is very important to me,” I announced, in my best mess-with-me-and-I’ll-knock-you-down-Bub voice.
“Me too,” he said, to my surprise. We sat idling at a stoplight in his puttering green VW. “In fact,” he went on, “I always thought that if I ever got married, I’d want my wife and I to hyphenate our names. Both of us, I mean.”
Wow, I thought, he just might be the one….
Two years later we stood in the woods grooving on a classic hippie wedding, right down to my unbleached muslin dress and the vegetarian reception under the trees. Soon after we hiked down to City Hall to have our names legally changed: both of us would henceforth be Mathewes-Greens. We didn’t know that the usual custom is for the woman’s name to go first; we chose billing solely for euphony. “Green-Mathewes” sounded clunky, and besides, we joked, we wanted to have kids. Don’t you know that old song, “God Didn’t Make Little Green Mathewes”?
It didn’t work out. Oh, the marriage did; 30 years later, Gary is my sweetheart more than ever. We have been blessed in more ways than we can count. But the name didn’t turn out to be such a great idea.
I always thought hypenated names was an ludicrously stupid practice; like feminism itself it held the inevitable seeds of its own destruction. It never ceases to amaze me how even intelligent and educated people are so seldom capable of projecting the logical consequences of their actions into the future. But, as Mrs. Mathewes-Green points out, the most important thing is the marriage relationship itself, not the trappings.
I do wonder, though, why so many writers at National Review are either former Communists, former Democrats, or former hippies. Perhaps if most of their contributors weren’t former members of the other side, they might be taken a little more seriously by the majority of those who are supposed to be on their side now.
It seems that academics are the last to figure out the fundamental impracticality of hyphenation: “There is a bizarro-world custom being perpetrated by many I know in the academy who get married: that of combining both last names with a hyphen to create one last name to be used by both couples.”
Although, I suppose if you’ve got two aging left-wing professors getting together, they’re not that likely to have kids before they divorce or the she-spouse hits menopause.