June is here, which means so is wedding season — the time of year when churches and reception halls are booked solid as couples in love bind themselves together in marriage.
The officials at those ceremonies, whether they be clergy or justices of the peace, have a fairly uniform script to follow.
There’s the "do you, …?" part.
And the "I now pronounce you …" part.
And although gay marriage in Iowa doesn’t always mean the next word is "bride," there’s still the "you may kiss the …" part.
It’s the ending, the part where the new couple is introduced to the applause of the assembled friends and family, that modern convention has turned tradition on its ear. No longer can people attending a wedding expect it to end with the "and now I give you Mr. and Mrs. …" part.
These days, there are so many other possibilities.
"I love my family. I love my name," said Wendi Riggens-Miller of Burlington, who has been married to Travis Riggens-Miller for two weeks shy of six years.
"It’s nice people have choices, you know," said Jane Evans, assistant superintendent of the Burlington School District, who maintained her last name when she remarried six years ago.
To change, or not — and how
In a new guide from Quirk Books, "The Newlywed’s Instruction Manual: Essential Information, Troubleshooting Tips, and Advice for the First Year of Marriage," by Caroline Tiger, tucked within a chapter on finances and paperwork is a section about name changes.
"Depending on the person, the decision to change your last name can range from easy to agonizing," Tiger wrote, adding it is a choice most commonly faced by women. "Men hardly ever change their names after marriage, although it’s not unheard of."
The book goes on to outline the options for a made-up couple, Jane Smith and John Jones.
First is the most traditional, with the wife taking the husband’s last name — Mr. and Mrs. Jones.
Other options include the wife keeping her own last name; the wife adds her husband’s last name to hers, with or without a hyphen — Jane Smith-Jones; she continues to use her name professionally but takes his for social purposes, with or without hyphenation; they each take the other’s name, and become Mr. and Mrs. Smith-Jones or John Jones-Smith and Jane Smith-Jones, hyphenated or not; the husband takes his wife’s last name — John Smith.
Another option not included is a wholesale name change — Smith and Jones become Johnson, for instance.
Nontraditional catching on
A review last week of 123 marriage licenses dating from October to late May on file at the Des Moines County Recorder’s office included 17 couples who chose not to stand upon tradition.
There were two instances where the husband and wife each adopted a new last name, and two in which the husband took his wife’s last name. There were instances in which the wife hyphenated her last name but the husband did not, and one where the wife hyphenated and the husband added his wife’s maiden name to his middle name.
Including a number of local and out-of-state gay and lesbian couples, there were several marriages where both hyphenated and two who kept their own names.
Among the other 106 filed licenses reviewed, two were for couples who started with the same last name.
The rest were of the traditional sort — including gay and lesbian couples of whom one took the other’s last name.
What’s in a name?
A variety of factors inform these decisions. According to "The Newlywed’s Instruction Manual," reasons include tradition,discount tiffany, disliking your name, having an easier time at the hospital in an emergency with a differently named spouse or child without needing a copy of the marriage license to prove the relationship.
The book also outlines reasons not to change, which include name as identity; professional reasons; fear of becoming difficult to find by people who knew you by your birth name; disliking your spouse’s last name.
With so many things influencing the decision, there may be no two couples whose motivations to change last names, or not, are precisely the same.
Introduced at age 17 by her cousin who was his co-worker at APAC, the Riggens-Millers have been together for 11 years. And from not long after they were engaged, a shared hyphenation of their last names was decided on.
And it was his idea.
"I’m very close to my family," Wendi said, adding that without a brother or any cousins, the Riggens name would have died out after she and her sister married.
Hyphenating helped to preserve her family name, and also deepens Travis’ connection to that side of the family after growing up disconnected from his mother’s family after her death when he was 10, and not being especially close to his father’s family.
"He actually suggested taking my name," Wendi said. "I was completely taken aback by that."
As much as she didn’t want to lose her identity, Wendi said she did not want Travis to lose his, either. But to Travis, who was born a Mackey and renamed Miller — his mom’s maiden name — when he was adopted by an aunt and uncle after his mom died, "it didn’t really matter."
Wendi said she was the more hesitant, fearing he might come to regret the choice. To this day, though, she said he is the most enthusiastic about the change.
Her parents are all for it.
Some of their wedding guests were taken by surprise when they were introduced with their new last name, but plenty — mostly women — loved it.
Other than her wedding and family portrait business, which she named Wendi Riggens Photography for marketing purposes, or ordering pizza as Wendi Miller, they are the Riggens-Millers through and through. Even their son, Maddox, shares his parents’ hyphenated name.
When he is older, Maddox’s parents will let him choose to drop the hyphen and choose to be a Miller or a Riggens. If he wants to. If not, that’s fine, too.
Though not changing does give his mother one worry for the future: What if he meets and falls in love with another hyphenated child.
"I think about that all the time," Wendi said. "What will they do when he gets married?"
Evans, the soon-to-be superintendent of the Burlington schools, has been married to Rick Buller for six years. She held on to Evans, she said, because she had been Mrs. Evans professionally for many years.
"After you’ve been Evans for so long," she said, "it becomes part of your identity."
Maintaining the Evans name also does honor to her first husband, to whom she had been married 20 years at the time he died at 51 of a heart attack while playing basketball at the Muscatine YMCA in 1998.
It was easier to keep it because Buller had no problem with it, Evans said. Plus,tiffany necklaces, for a woman whose maiden name was Hicks, there is a significant benefit to keeping her late husband’s last name.
"I hardly ever have to spell Evans," she said.
Unlike Evans and Wendi Riggens-Miller, Christopher McDonald of Burlington couldn’t get rid of his last name soon enough, choosing to trade in Boales for his wife’s last name.
"I hated my name," McDonald said. "The way it sounded, and the way people made fun of it in school."
It might not be obvious to all, but to school-yard tormentors, he said Boales is easily turned into the slang word for a certain part of the male anatomy.
Those feelings in mind, there was no debate over switching when he and Jamie McDonald were married last month.
"I just told her I wanted to take her last name," Christopher McDonald said.
Cindy Mejia married Robert Pierce in February, but she didn’t become Mrs. Pierce. He didn’t stay Mr. Pierce either,tiffany, though. Since tying the knot, they have been Cindy and Robert Davis, which is the last name of his father, whom he met when he was 10. Pierce was the last name of the man his mother was seeing at the time Robert was born, Cindy Davis said.
Filling out the marriage license gave him the chance to regain his family name, she said.
Not just John and Jane
In a state that recognizes gay marriage, name choice isn’t a consideration only for traditional couples. Gay and lesbian couples deal with it, too.
For Greg Flietner of Burlington, taking his husband Cody’s last name wasn’t simply a matter of keeping with convention. Other options were considered, he said, but in the end, practicality won the day.
"At first," the former Greg Moehlman said, "we didn’t have any set way we were going to do it."
They considered hyphenating to become Moehlman-Flietner, but that was judged to be "way too long." They also considered a blending of names and becoming the Flietmans, or they become the Moehlmans. Ultimately, though, the decision for Greg to take Cody’s last name came down to the fact that between them, he faced less paperwork hassle related to making a switch.
For the Flietners, keeping their own last names was not an option. Sharing a name was important to them.
"It shows we are one now," Greg Flietner said.
Think about it
Bottom line,tiffany rings, a marriage license is a legal document, said Kathryn Waterhouse, the Des Moines County recorder. That means whatever name a person puts down is official as soon as the license is filed.
Staff at her office advise people to think hard about their name decisions.
"If you decide you don’t like it, you can change it again," Waterhouse said. "But you have to go to court and pay lots of money — unless you get married again."
