For the first three years of wedded bliss, Katie Jones lived with her new married name, Katie Jones Schmitt — and hated it.
"It was confusing for people. It was too long. No one knew how to spell it," she said of the multiple variations on her husband's surname. "He knew I didn't like it. Sometimes I was passive-aggressive about it."
When she was single, various friends — in their excitement to greet her — would call out, "Katie Jones!"
After the wedding, they floundered their way through the old salutation. It became "Katie Jones (pause) ... Schmitt," a greeting that left her crestfallen.
"To not have that greeting, it was losing something," she said. "It feels really silly to say that, but it was a thing that rolled off the tongue. 'Katie Jones Schmitt' does not."
So one Christmas, her husband, Peter, surprised her with a gift so brilliant that she couldn't have even conjured it herself: an envelope of the paperwork needed to legally change her name back to Katie Jones.
"I had to rectify my own mistakes," Peter told me, adding that he had gently pressured her to take his name leading up to their wedding. "We were getting pigeonholed into traditions. At some point you have to say, 'Let's fix this.'"
It's wedding season, and if you are betrothed, hopefully you feel rock-solid about the life partner you've picked. But deciding on your new identity — whether you'll take your spouse's name, keep your birth name, or forge an entirely new name as a couple and for any future children — can be fraught with uncertainty.