Jiggs

I love what people have been saying in this thread re: women being expected to just accept being called Mrs. X, even if you didn’t change your name, because if you correct people you are an Angry Feminist Bitch. That is some bullshit right there. Why the hell do I need to be okay with people calling me the wrong name? I’m certainly not going to yell at them, but you know what, I get to correct them. As many times as necessary. And if they keep calling me Mrs. X, they are being just as rude as if they always called me Julia when my name was Jane.

I once ran into this after making a jokey Facebook status along the lines of “My name is actually not Mrs. X, it’s Ms. Y, you can update your Christmas card lists accordingly ;)” At the time, no one on my Facebook had sent me anything addressed to such (and if they had I wouldn’t have posted it because I’m not into public call outs!) but that did not stop one of my husband’s cousins from telling me I should just be grateful to get Christmas cards. It made me so mad. Like, really, I have to be slobberingly grateful for a $0.25 piece of subpar cardstock and a stamp from someone <i>who doesn’t even know my name</i>? I can get that level of recognition from my dentist’s office for Christ’s sake; it’s not like you passed my down the family heirloom quilt and I set it on fire.

So yes, basically, fuck being afraid of correcting people for fear of being a crazy name Nazi. It’s your name! That is a pretty basic thing to expect people to know.

I hope your next conversations go better with your bf, Fabelle, that sounds like a drag. If it helps at all, what I said to my boyfriend-now-husband when we had pretty much this same conversation was “How would you feel if after our wedding everyone called you Kevin <i>forever</i>?” (His name is not Kevin.) Then I told him I would feel the same way about changing my name. Somehow that seemed to snap it into perspective for him.