Né Buchar: Why I took my wife's last name
I’ve been Nate Meyer for two years. Before that, I was Nate Buchar.
But there are still some remnants of my former name here and there. I did decide to keep my GitHub username @nathanbuchar so as not to break links to a couple of my popular open source projects and, despite formally changing my name with my credit card company, receipts at restaurants still show “Nathaniel Buchar” under the signature line. Also, nathanbuchar.com still points here.
After I get to know people well enough that I feel comfortable sharing, it’s always a fun bit of trivia on my end to say that I took my wife’s last name. Especially here in Central Michigan—not exactly a leader in progressive thinking.
“Why?” is of course the question that follows, and I’m always happy to oblige: “It was an act of love.”
Unequal risk
If it’s not evident from this website already, I work in software. I’ve been very fortunate with some of the opportunities I’ve had, and so far I’ve made a good living. Prior to our marriage, I held a pretty sizeable portfolio, and I had even bought my dream home (the house my wife and I live in today). There were a lot of assets in my name.
But she wasn’t going into the marriage with much. She hadn’t started her career yet, and was just getting by working as a Crew Member at Trader Joes and as a substitute teacher.
'Til death do us part is, of course, very much our goal, but we’re also not naive. Divorce happens. We took stock and we agreed that, if we were to divorce, we would retain our premarital property. In other words, among other things, I would keep the house.
We both agreed from a strictly rational standpoint that this made sense, but of course it also meant that we were entering into the marriage with very different levels of risk.
If we were to get married, move across the country, and then go through a divorce, I would probably be just fine, whereas she would need to start over. We of course would split any money earned during our marriage, but she was taking a huge leap uprooting her life and putting her trust in me, and I wasn’t risking much in return.
What could I do to meet her in the middle?
Last names
When we were discussing last names before we applied for the marriage license, our starting point was the traditional one: she would take my last name. I’ve never expected a future spouse to take my last name, but it was my de facto assumption.
We quickly found out, though, that it might not be the best avenue for us. To start, it was important to her to not lose “Meyer”. We considered replacing her middle name, but she wanted to keep that as well. We tried hyphenating her middle name, but it was just too bulky.
So what were the alternatives?
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Keep them different. I know it’s becoming increasingly popular nowadays to not change last names at all but, for me, the symbolic union created by sharing a name was important to me. Also, parents (particularly fathers) traveling internationally with young daughters who don’t share a surname is known to cause headaches at customs. Keeping them different was a no-go.
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Hyphenate. I wasn’t too fond of hyphenation either. It’s a heavy-handed approach, and our last names just don’t sound all that great together. Further, hyphenating our last names only passes the buck to our future child, who then must decide how to handle their own complicated last name challenges upon marriage and would almost certainly opt to ditch it entirely. It’s a camel of a solution, and it wasn’t right for us.
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Create a new one. Per the U.S. Family Code, we did have the option to create a new last name, but the Code requires that the new last name must be made of parts of the former last names. So it’s not like we could create a completely different, brand new and unique last name (well, at least not as part of a marriage process). I wrote a script to generate all valid combinations of our last names, but there just wasn’t anything all that good.
So that just left one thing: me taking her last name.
In the past, the idea of taking my significant others’ last names had crossed my mind, assuming the relationship panned out. Frelier, Overmoyer, Reed, Formanek—these all sound great with Nate.
But could I even take her last name? In Michigan and and most other U.S. states: no. Simple as that. But there are eighteen states which do allow a man to adopt his wife’s last name upon marriage without the need for a court order, and California, where we were living at that time, is included among them.
A man adopting his wife’s last name isn’t terribly common, but it is becoming increasingly more popular.
A Pew Research study from 2023 found that 5% of men in opposite-sex marriages took their spouse’s last name.[1] It sounds low at face value, but in reality that’s one person in a room of twenty. Those aren’t bad odds. Aside: Interestingly, the same study also found that less than 1% of men hyphenated their and their spouse’s last names, meaning hyphenation is actually measurably less common than just taking the woman’s last name.
I realized, taking her last name would be an opportunity for me to show her that I was as equally invested in our love. Although the risk on my part was different than hers, it showed a deep commitment, and was a representation of my belief in us.
So, I decided I would take her name as an act of love.
Reaction
I let my parents know ahead of time I was planning on taking her last name. I truly didn’t anticipate that there would be any issue. Maybe a bit of surprise, but not much more other than love and support. I’ve always forged my own path, and it’s always panned out well for me, and they know that.
I was very wrong.
My father was furious. He kept telling me I was making a mistake. After dodging his angry calls, he even left me the following voicemail, which I think is important to share here in its entirety.
Transcription: So we should talk live about this. I get more and more concerned about it every minute, the more I think about it. I think you’re making one of the three worst mistakes I’ve seen in my entire lifetime. The first one was when mom said that she wanted to keep the kids back a year from kindergarten and I thought it was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard of — and I was right. The second thing was when she said she wanted to homeschool you — that was the second stupidest thing I ever let happen. This is the third. You should call me back.
I assured him that my changing my name didn’t have anything to do with rejecting my family, but everything to do with the love I had for my fiancée. It didn’t matter.
He said he was trying to stop me because he didn’t want me to “ruin my career”, an excuse he kept going back to (spoiler: it didn’t). Maybe at an old moldy corporate company like where he worked for 35 years — showing up every day in a suit — but not any place I’ll ever work.
But it was all just projection. All of his arguments weren’t really grounded in reason, but were instead clearly covering up his feelings of rejection and loss of control, but he couldn’t admit that (he still hasn’t). He eventually cooled off after a month or two of being on my block list (and with the help of some sane words from my older brother).
Today, things with us are more or less back to normal. He gave a loving speech at our wedding but, now and again, any time he offers his opinion about something, he prefaces it with “nobody cares what I have to say, but . . .” Clearly he has still has some unresolved issues.
In retrospect, given the way he reacted, I feel even more confident that changing my name was the right decision, especially given that it freed me from his misguided perception that he had control of the decisions in my life.
He still hasn’t ever apologized to me or my wife. The most I’ve gotten is “I realize the error in my ways.”
Today
So is life any different now that my name is different? No, of course not! My name is less “unique” now, being that I share it with a lot more people now . . . But I also get to share it with my wife. What could be better than that?
You might have seen that, when denoting maiden names in writing, one might write “Jane Austen (née Doe)” where née is a French word adopted into English that represents the feminine past participle of naître, which means “to be born”. In my case, I would actually use the rare masculine form, né.
So, I’m Nate Meyer (né Buchar).
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