Easy answer: Maybe, it’s too much of a hassle to change it. As a kid, I dreamed of taking my husband’s last name. To be so in love with someone that I would want to share everything, including my name, with him. To me, taking his name was not just tradition, but also a romantic symbol of the family we were creating together, just as my parents had.
In elementary school I realized the choice was not as instinctual as I once thought. I remember flipping through the index of my school’s phonebook, confused by all the moms who chose to have different last names from their kids. I remember struggling to decide what to call my best friend’s mom, Mrs. Tang? Ms. Zhou? As I progressed in my professional life, my last name became more and more meaningful to me, and with that, much harder to give up. Six letters, “Chen, S.L.”, carry tens of thousands of hours devoted to science and research. This week, my patient with metastatic colon cancer, trying to decide whether or not to go through another round of chemotherapy, asked me, “Dr. Chen, what would you do?” In that moment, my name represented the earned trust of a dying patient, and the privilege of caring for people at the most vulnerable points in their lives. But the choice to keep my name also comes with its own host of questions. A few months ago, I took a trip with my fiancé’s parents, brother, and brother’s fiancé, who I look up to affectionately as my “new older sister”. I sat uneasily at dinner when the bride-to-be excitedly proclaimed she had waited to personalize her new purse, so that she could proudly display her new last name after marriage. In that moment, the questions flooded my mind: Will my fiancés family think I am not as committed? Will people question my marriage when I introduce myself? Who did I want to become now that I had chosen to be someone’s wife? Like selecting vendors for our wedding, none of the options for a new name felt like the perfect fit. I bounced ideas off my fiancé. What about Sabrina Chen-Jiang? Loved the sound of that but hated the way it looked on paper. Or Sabrina Jiang Chen? SJC would be awesome initials – my favorite airport and the city I grew up in – but would that confuse future employers looking at my research publications? I am lucky that my fiancé is supportive, no matter what I ultimately decide, but I can’t help but wonder why the decision falls on me. If marriage is all about the union of two families, why was no one asking him whether he wants to be Mr. Chen? In the coming months, I’ll continue to ask myself how to keep who I am and everything I have worked for, while also celebrating one of the most important new chapters of my life. I hope the answer will come naturally, but I’ve come to accept that, like every important decision in my life, there probably isn’t one correct option. Whether I take or keep, I may never feel like I made the right choice. It will also be increasingly important to remind myself that, at the end of the day, a name is a label, not an identity. After all, it was the quintessential lover, Juliet, who once said, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”
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