A MARRIAGE OF TWO NAMES: From the Chicago Tribune

[Mostly an oddment, but hey, slow news day. I do think, in general, that kids and parents should share a surname. --Eve]

Like brides and grooms everywhere, Amanda and Bryan Kolburn combined their belongings when they wed in 2002. They consolidated their furnishings under one roof. They put their money in a shared account. They combined their collections of books and CDs.

But the Columbia, Mo., couple went a step further. When they tied the knot, they also combined their surnames. And they didn't just hitch them together with a hyphen. They fused letters from their given names -- Kowal and Burns -- to form their marital surname, Kolburn. ...

Laurie Scheuble, a Penn State University sociologist who studies surname trends, said that in her recent survey of 600 married women selected from the staff directory of a university system, only one had a melded name. In the population as a whole, she would expect to find even fewer "melders" because university employees and other well-educated women generally are more likely to opt for unconventional names.

But melding perhaps will catch on as prominent people such as Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, usher the practice from obscurity. Before marrying Corina Raigosa, the mayor-elect's surname was Villar. The pair simply dropped one R and combined the remaining letters of their last names to form their marital moniker. ...

Resistance from family and friends also can stand in the way of melded marital bliss. Although the Kolburns believe their combined last name honors the importance of each other's ancestries and symbolically links them, Bryan's family initially was miffed that the Burns' name wouldn't carry on--intact--to the next generation. ...

Despite potential pitfalls, Bonpasse of the Lucy Stone League believes melding will eventually catch on because of its practicality: "It avoids the classic hyphenation problem, the apprehension that people have that if they hyphenate their names, and then their children hyphenate their names, then there'll eventually be chaos," he said.

He also predicts that melding will gain popularity as gay marriages gain legal footing across the United States.

"With heterosexual marriage, there's more pressure to go the traditional route, but there aren't any conventions governing gay marriage," he said. "I think as the principles of choice and equality spread across the land, with gays showing us the way, we'll see more melding and other creative solutions start to emerge."

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posted by Eve at 4:24 PM VOTE

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