{"id":129,"date":"2024-09-18T20:39:00","date_gmt":"2024-09-18T20:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/divergentlybeing.co.uk\/wp-blog\/?p=129"},"modified":"2026-07-02T09:31:59","modified_gmt":"2026-07-02T09:31:59","slug":"whats-in-a-name","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/whats-in-a-name\/","title":{"rendered":"What&#8217;s in a name?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">No this isn&#8217;t a post about Shakespeare, although that is one of my special interests (guess which play this quote comes from in the comments!).<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">What I wanted to talk about was the dilemma of what to do with your name when you get married.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Traditionally, women would change their surname to take their husband&#8217;s surname. This stems from when women were considered property &#8211; they legally became the possession of their husband on marriage. Whilst this isn&#8217;t the case anymore and taking your husband&#8217;s name isn&#8217;t required in most countries (some countries have even made it a legal requirement for women to retain their surnames), many heterosexual women continue to take their husband&#8217;s name after marriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I was adamant that I wanted to retain my name, I was almost 31 when I got married, all my qualifications were in my maiden name. I also felt that my identity was &#8216;Sonay Erten&#8217; and I didn&#8217;t want to change that. But I still wanted to reflect the fact I was married so changed most things to &#8216;Mrs Sonay Erten&#8217;. I say most things, I couldn&#8217;t figure out how to do it with my current account and it was an admin burden I didn&#8217;t fancy after all the wedding planning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But the past 3 years, Mrs Sonay Erten hasn&#8217;t felt right. I still feel like it&#8217;s not my identity, especially as my mum is &#8216;Mrs S Erten&#8217;. So I decided that I will go double-barrelled after all (after all my objections to changing my name). What helped me decide was the fact that James also agreed to become double-barrelled so we both have the same name and both go through the process of changing our name rather than it just being something I had to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">So now I&#8217;m off to figure out what the process is and gear myself up for some more boring admin! Send ideas and advice my way!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-divergently-blogging"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":165,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129\/revisions\/165"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.divergentlybeing.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}