Going to the chapel….

1. A dessert?

   Same name – surely that should be in the shallow rather deep end?

   But well done and all that….I think it is our ten-year anniversary of first LI this month.

2. Ah, lovely post, brought a tear to my eye 🙂

3. nah – same name is important to me personally so it does belong in the deep end for me.

4. Aww – feeling all warm and glowy here.

   Oh, and I agree with the name thing. For me, a name is part of your identity (I guess that’s why many women choose to keep their own on marriage). But I see my first name as *my* identity (which doesn’t change and the surname as my *family* identity. On marriage, we created an additional, new and mutual, identity for ourselves, and the name is just an outward sign of that. Could have been any name, but I was happy to go with tradition as had no reason not to. The fact that it was the same was the important bit.

5. I can understand your thoughts Barbara *until* you didn’t create a new name for the new family. That would have been the logical conclusion. As it is it looks like *you* are becoming part of *his* family. To me it makes it appear that a man’s name is more important that a woman’s.

   I can vaguely understand why people want to share an identity through name, just not why it is the man’s name. That said, I would still be exactly the same person I am if my name was Chris Tooth, so kind of think names are merely tags.

6. Happy anniversary. 🙂 I’m not even going to get into the name thing 🙂

7. Not going to try to work out the best place to put this!

   Just wanted to say that Elijah got a Letterland workbook – for some reason he really likes Letterland? – called ‘Building Words’ iirc, and it’s very 100EL in theory (building up the c-a-t sounds), but without all the boring offputting repetition in practice. Looks like a comic really. I know you said that Davies didn’t like 100EL and so you thought the whole phonics approach might not work for him, but maybe just a slightly more ‘fun’ method might appeal.

   Of course, ignore if that sounds crap, just thought I’d mention it 🙂

8. Well, yes, and it did cross my mind. But I’m so unispirational with things like that. In a sense, you guys have done this, because by default your family, collectively, is thought of as ‘the portico’ – that’s your family identity, even if it’s not what’s written on your passports. I guess double barrel would be the other obvious solution, but Yates-Raine just sounds silly, and then what would our kids do if/when they in turn get wed. The way I saw it was that we had two perfectly good names to pick from and to be honest, the reason we used his rather than mine really does just boil down to not feeling strongly enough about it *not* being his name to upset people I love by rejecting it (as that is how they would see it). We weren’t about to use mine just to prove a point. The important part is the sameness, not whose it was originally. And yes, I suppose I am quite a traditional type of girl at heart too. I’ll concede that.

9. Davies’ name would have been pretty silly if we’d taken my surname on as the family name 😉

10. My s-i-l got married a couple of years back and her husband took her name. He is possibly the only Sven Sambrook ever.

    Some friends of ours didn’t like either of their names, so they chose a name from each side of the family – her great-grandmother’s name, and one they thought was from somewhere in his family, though it later turned out it wasn’t, and made their own double-barrelled name. Her sister didn’t get married but wanted a new surname for her daughter, which she and her partner also took, so they just chose a name they liked.

    I quite liked doing the traditional thing, myself 🙂

11. It’s other people who have identified us as “The Portico” though, not us! We came up with it 9 years ago (months after we were married) when we needed something for our first email address (and back then it was just portico because Demon would only let you use up to 9 letters!). I’m the only one of the 6 of us who still uses it these days, mainly because I can’t be bothered to tell everyone a new address.

    I *do* think identity involves one’s name, which is a large part of the reason why I didn’t want to change mine. Sharing a name doesn’t mean anything to me though, we just wanted to be married. These days I’m not so sure about marriage – I loved the ceremony, the ritual of it, but if it were easier I think I might get divorced actually, and make some other public display of our commitment.

12. We could have matching tattoos dear.

13. Where? 🙂

14. That’s what I meant by ‘default’ Alison – it what other people have ended up using in order to collectively and affectionally refer to ‘Alison, Chris and family’ for want of anything easier (like a family surname). A nickname I guess is even more part of your identity because it’s also how others see you. We don’t chose our nicknames. I actually think you have the ideal solution.

    Interested to hear why you would get divorced (if you could be bothered) in order to show your commitment in another way. If marriage is so indifferent to your relationship, then surely it wouldn’t matter whether you were or not and you could make that public display regardless.

15. back from hols and catching up. I actually – given half a chace would have one with the norse daughter thing – though helen johnsdaughter not actually greatly differnt – but dad being of norse stock, they did the john johnson thing when naturalised.
    in fact, if i were truy honest, i would have elinor and alys helensdaughter!
    I have no intention of being anything other than johnson though, and when pur wedding phtots came trhough addressed to mt and mrs french i had a minor strop as i couldn’t understand why addressed to chris’s parents [until chris pointed out the photographer had meant us]
    each to his own though.

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