In hindsight, it is surprising that it didn’t happen sooner, that my first misgivings about my flawed compass of feminism didn’t creep in during the six-month process of planning my wedding. Of course, if popular culture had its way, then marriage and feminism would be mutually exclusive variables and the notion of willingly entering a heterosexual marriage would have been the equivalent of having my feminist card pried loose from my fingers. The feminist movement may have evolved from the bra-burning days of fore but it takes five minutes of lacing up a lehenga with a supercilious boutique assistant to realise that the bridal ecosystem is still propped up to prey on female insecurities. And yet, my first feminism crisis would slickly evade all moral hurdles until two months after my marriage when I decided to take my husband’s last name as my own.
For clarity, this wasn’t a decision borne from a lack of options. In today’s age, there are endless ways to fashionably update your name after the big shindig. You could pull a JLo and take it on your chin. “People are still going to call me Jennifer Lopez. But my legal name will be Mrs. Affleck because we’re joined together. We’re husband and wife. I’m proud of that. It still carries tradition and romance to me,” she crisply declared in an interview with Vogue. Or you could opt for a more understated route by adopting your partner’s initials into your name—as witnessed in Anand Ahuja’s thoughtful upgrade to ‘Anand S Ahuja’ the morning after his wedding to Sonam Kapoor. From swapping surnames to the Scandinavian tradition of choosing a new family name altogether, there are endless options except for hyphenation, never hyphenate—nobody needs that much of a mouthful.
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And yet, in this world teeming with choices, changing my last name was a voluntary decision. If adopting my husband’s last name befuddled my contemporaries, I cannot admit to any scarcity of cognitive dissonance either as I thumbed through treatise after impassioned treatise about how taking my husband’s last name would lead to the erasure of my identity as an individual. Was I dragging the movement back, I wondered, or was I simply a cautionary tale of what the modern-day feminist should not look like?
My musings would lead me to Tanya Vasunia, a psychologist, published researcher, and perhaps more importantly, a friendly voice of experience, having recently gotten married herself. “There were times when I felt like I was being a bad feminist,” she concedes and I subconsciously allow my breath to whoosh out in an expulsion of it’s-not-just-me relief. For Vasunia, one of the trials that would arise after marriage would be in choosing to be in New York City or Washington DC. While the latter offered better schools for her to restart her practice, the former would be more conducive to her husband’s career. “The decision was ultimately based on practicality—he would make more money than me, a crucial factor to be taken into account when planning a shared future—although we had a lot of tricky conversations about why I felt my identity as a woman was feeling sidelined in the process of building our lives. Having already moved for his career, there was a lack of acknowledgement that we had to really work on together as a couple,” she recounts.
A candid conversation with some married friends would reveal that these struggles were not unique to us, from those debating between whether to publicly wear a mangalsutra to couples working out living arrangements with in-laws. “You need to be able to look back at your decisions and feel good about them, to know that they held up to your values and your identity as a woman at the time. Feminism is a spectrum and it will shift consistently throughout your lifetime. It is important to be the kind of woman that you feel comfortable being,” Vasunia affirms.
And if you were to allow this flawed feminist some liberty, it is perhaps this sense of commiseration in her words that can make the sisterhood feel more inviting, rather than a judgmental noose of disapproval. When I followed Vasunia’s advice and allowed myself to sit with the notion of changing my last name, my thoughts started to crystallise. Yes, there would be administrative benefits of being processed together as a family and maybe, there is some romanticism still lingering in the idea of adopting a shared name that would make our future children feel part of a family unit. But the most persuasive reason was one that took me the most time to voice out loud: my maiden name simply didn’t fit me anymore. Perhaps it is the life experiences that await after a marriage, but in many ways, I felt that I had matured and outgrown my former name. Embracing my husband’s name then became a way for me to explore a fresh aspect of my identity, to try it on for size and see how it fit.
It still happens though, suddenly and without warning, the need to rationalise my decision to change my last name by reciting our shared calculus of chores, almost as though to offer proof that we have entered this marriage as equals. But any sense of treachery I feel towards the feminist cause seems to fade as I look up from typing this article to find that the dying battery of my iPad has been thoughtfully put to charge while I was sleeping. It may be hard to have all the answers or to devise a precise blueprint for a feminist marriage but as long as my husband and I are able to ground our marriage in a shared respect and understanding for each other’s contributions and tribulations, as trivial or monumental as they may be, we can perhaps move together towards a more equitable future.
