On March 21, 2013, I legally changed my name from "Andrew Thomas Correa" to "Andrew Thomas Correa Sabisch".
"Why the change?", you might ask. Well, I was about to get married to my wife, Ashley Murray, and we weren't sure what to do about our last name. The realistic options were:
- She could take my name.
- I could take her name.
- We each could keep our own names.
- We could hyphenate or otherwise combine our names.
- We could choose a new name to adopt together.
After quite some discussion, we agreed that there were several issues with each of these options:
- This is too old fashioned for us. It seems to us to be a remnant of a male-dominant society, where a man takes a woman as his, and she (fittingly) adopts his name to show that she has switched families.
- This isn't much better than #1. On top of that, since it's unusual for a husband to take his wife's name, it may be insulting to the remaining Correa's that I would give up my family name.
- This didn't work for us, because we both want to start a family, and we both like the idea of having a common family name.
- This makes for a complicated name that, aesthetically, just didn't gel with either of us. Also, if we combine or hyphenate our name, we still have to determine which of our names shows up first. Once we decided upon that, you've got to admit that it's not a sustainable practice. If that kept on through our lines, eventually there might be Correa-Murray-Johnson-Smith-Yang-Bhatnagar's in the world.
- Here we have to determine which name to adopt, and we still have to give up our names, leaving the possibility of insult intact.
So after much deliberation and talking with friends, we decided on option #6: appending a new name. This is very similar to #5, but without having to give up our names. This seemed the most equitable way to have the same name while not having to give up our family names.
For various personal reasons, we decided to adopt Sabisch. It was quite a decision, but we're very happy we chose to handle our name changes this way.