For all of the change these days, studies show that less than 3 percent of married men take their wife’s last name. That means that 97 percent of married couples still adhere to the custom where the wife walks away from the ceremony/courthouse with her husband’s last name, abandoning her own in the process. Who then are these few brave men bucking maybe the most traditional of marital traditions and doing the exact opposite.
“My last name is Njuguna, and my wife’s is Wairimu, so we tried Njurimu and Waguna. I even tried to get my wife she’s a doctor to get a new last name. I said,
what did matter was, she comes from a long line of doctors. My last name is a car dealership in Kiambu run by my uncle, which I have no ties to. And when I talked to my father about it, there weren’t any hard feelings.
There wasn’t a huge acceptance by my wife’s father. I don’t know what I was expecting. But there wasn’t, like, a high five. Either way, I wanted to honor her work and her family by taking her name. It was a gift, in some ways. And honestly, just to mess with people a little bit.
To that end, I like telling people in order to bring up the idea of patriarchy/matriarchy. There’s confusion more than anything else. Actually, I think my uncle was upset. He was like, “You shouldn’t do that to your father.” I told him, “Have you talked to my dad? My dad’s fine.”
I feel like keeping or changing your name in a marriage is another one of these traditions from our political, social and economic institutions that you should bust open, just don’t care about it, just do it.
