The Name Change - A New Life as Mrs. G

Along with all the choices you have to make when you decide to get married, changing your name is yet another one. There are tons of options out there today. You can change your name to your husband's, you can keep your name as is, you can hyphenate and combine both your names, you can both change your name altogether or your husband can change his name to yours! (Pretty cool dude in my book.) Luckily, there are many options for those that wish to change their name, whole websites have even sprung up streamlining the fairly complicated process for you! (missnowmrs.com).

However, sometimes the decision to change your name can be a challenging one. Maybe you love your name and simply don't want to change it. Maybe the thought of having a new identity and a new name is just too strange of an option for you. Or maybe you want to keep your name for professional reasons. Every person's reasoning is different.

The whole name-change conversations bring back some old memories when back in our elementary school days we'd doodle on our notebooks with the last name of whatever crush we had at the moment. (C'mon ladies you know you did this! hehe) For me, it was definitely Mrs. DiCaprio (I had an ahem slight obsession with Leo to say the least.) You would imagine your life together and potential children's names that would go well with your new last name. Well fast forward about 15 years and this is the reality I'm facing as I get ready to embark on my life as a married woman. I was raised in a traditional home where my mom took my dad's last name and everyone around me was in the same situation. So for me, though I certainly support feminism and a woman's right to make her name-changing decision, the traditional route is what I opted for. This certainly wasn't a decision I made overnight but I can say that for me and my future husband, this option works best.

I had many personal reasons for doing this. For one, I like the fact that my husband and I would share a name and we'd be taking the first steps in building our baby family. And number two, my name is long as hell. Like longer than the alphabet, 30-letters, mostly-consonants-long. (It's Katarzyna Agnieszka Marciszewska, I wasn't kidding lol) Needless to say, as much as I love my name I am looking forward to paring it down a little. Patryk's last name still isn't the easiest to pronounce for people, but it's certainly easier than mine!

I'm still unsure how I'll handle the professional transition (as a writer your name is everything) but I do plan on embracing my new identity. It will be a bit weird at first but after speaking to women who have been married for many years, they laugh and say sometimes they forget their maiden names. As all these other aspects of my life change in married life, this will simply be another one to add to the list. Here's to my future as Mrs. Grobelny! :)