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Comment by aleph_minus_one | Hacker News Reader

This depends a lot on the country.

In Germany, it is intended to be hard to change your name; in the USA, the situation is different. Also in Germany, if you change your name voluntarily (without having a very good reason (CLARIFICATION: of course marriage is a good reason)), this is considered to be a strong sign that you deeply hate your parents (and did the name change because of that). Indeed, the people who I know who changed their first name to their middle name exactly did it because if this.

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> Also in Germany, if you change your name voluntarily […], this is considered to be a strong sign that you deeply hate your parents

Huh? I’m German and I have never heard of this.

> Huh? I’m German and I have never heard of this.

I am also German. The only people (in Germany) who I know and did a (forename) name change did this because they hated their parents, since changing the name is an open signal that you deeply hate what the parents did to you your whole life (including giving you your old name).

Do women generally not take their husbands name when they marry?

I rather had forenames in the back of my mind when I wrote my post. But indeed, because it is hard to change your name in Germany, I know quite some women who used marriage to get rid of a surname that they did not like, because there is hardly any other socially accepted way to get rid of it.

Here in Flanders some do, most don't. Why would they? They are as much a person as their husband, with an identity and family that is not any less valid than their husband's.

My point isn’t that they should (my wife didn’t) only that it’s very common for them to do this so thinking of names as mostly immutable is incorrect even where other forms of name changes are rare.

This is in fact one of the iconic places where lack of diversity in software teams cause problems. Men may have a blind spot around name changes that women don’t, because of their lived experience.

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