When it comes to social traditions, I am generally a fan of upholding them wherever I can. By “wherever I can” I mean that whenever it doesn’t make considerably more sense not to. The idea being that I am an odd fellow in so many ways that I can’t help that in the ways that I can help I should try to meet society half-way. My wife, despite being the most traditional of the Himmelreich girls, has a little more of a non-traditional outlook.

As a case and point, when we married, she chose to keep her maiden name. I was very unenthusiastic about it at the time, to say the least. There was no point at which it posed a threat to our coming nuptuals, but it was still something of a sore point. The reason behind this was not so much that I needed her to become a Truman or that I wanted to treat her like property or anything like that. It mostly came down to a desire to conform. I find it far more likely than not that I would have changed my last name to hers if I lived in a society where that was common.

Of course, that’s easy for guys to say. I hear guys say that when I am actually very skeptical that they would. It’s easy to talk about what you would do when you know you don’t have to. Most would, I suspect, in the same way that most women change their names. But a lot wouldn’t. The question a lot of guys ask is “What’s the difference between having the name one man (her father) gave her and the name another man (her husband) gave her?” This suggests to me that they don’t understand the issue or at least only understand part of it. It’s not just that she’s taking a man’s name, but it’s that she’s taking a new name after 20-30 years with the previous one.

I don’t think that I appreciated that myself until I got married and my friends started getting married. The logistical problems with changing your name are not very severe but can still be a pain. However, the name change formalizes a change in identity that guys are not asked to undergo. In my wife’s career, there is a formal aspect to this in that all of her licensure is under her previous name. But for others, they’ve built a name for themselves in their careers and communities and amongst their friends and all of those people now have to be informed of who you are.

With all of this in mind, I can understand why a lot of women object to it.

The response to all of this from a lot of guys is, “Yeah, well, I guess I can sort of see how that’s inconvenient, but there’s no obvious solution. A woman keeping her name means that they have no common name between them. Hyphenation is a temporary solution at best. So, since there are no alternatives, we might as well go with the status quo. The problem is that by choosing not to conform, you’re making a statement against conformity. And you’re using our marriage to do it.”

Honestly, this was one of the two biggest humps for me to get over. When she told me that she intended to keep her name, I just had visions of getting caught in the middle. Correcting people that assumed that her last name was the same as mine. Lending my ear to her frustration at people that just assumed that our names were the same or forgot that they weren’t. I expected it to be a serious inconvenience. Incidentally, I expected this not because traditionalists were warning me to try to get me to go the traditional route, but rather by listening to more than a few complaints from women that kept their names about how people are not expecting or accepting their decision. This was just one front of the culture war I wanted no part of.

The second hump was there being no common family name. This was where some concessions were requested and others made, though unfortunately not the same concessions. Clancy volunteered to hyphenate her name because that was where she could meet me halfway. Unfortunately, for me, that’s sort of like my wanting a beard and she wanting me clean shaven* and us agreeing on a moustache as a compromise. Between hyphenation and two names, I am completely and utterly indifferent. Even if her last name incorporates mine, it’s still a different last name and makes a similar “statement” that I am not enthusiastic about making.** My proposed solution was that she go my Himmelreich professionally and Truman personally. From her perspective, though, even if she were being called Himmelreich, not having that last name was not something she was going to be happy about. So I decided to propose the alternative: her legal name and professional name remain Himmelreich (or incorporate it into hyphenation if she wants), but socially she be willing to go by Truman. In other words, no big deal about correction. Likewise, I would not object to being called Will Himmelreich as that would be an alternate name for me.

That was enough to get us by until I discovered that having two different last names actually isn’t that big of a deal. That may change when we have kids, but given the number of times I’m expressly asked if we have the last name, I am thinking not. While a house of two names is not the norm, it’s at least common enough. Particularly amongst doctors. And the whole question about answering machines turned out not to be an issue, either, because we don’t want her last name on our answering machine anyway. Nor do we want her name plastered visible from the sidewalk. We don’t want to invite needy patients calling our family line or visiting our family house. And I’m at the point where I wouldn’t care if our phone messages said Himmelreich-Truman anyway. The whole different-last-names thing has become sufficiently uncontroversial that I remain glad that I did not make it a bigger issue than I did or stand my ground or risk losing the wonderful woman who is among the best things ever to happen to me.

It has become slightly a bigger deal since moving to Arapaho. I have been referred to as a Himmelreich on a couple of occasions and our auto insurance company wasn’t able to handle the two-last-names thing. In the case of Callie, though, it’s a small enough town that it’ll get around. And though it’s not what people out here are expecting (in comparison to Cascadia), nobody has looked at me like I’m one of those kind of people.

I was hoping to eloquently work this last part in to the above prose, but it just didn’t quite fit. So bear with me. The notion that this is a problem without a solution and therefore there are no answers and so somebody loses their name so it might as well be the woman actually isn’t right. There really is a good solution to this: everybody gets a male and female last name. The name we mostly use and carry to the next generation is the name of our gender. The way that this would work is that if Clancy and I have a daughter, she would formally be Lain Lindsey Himmelreich-Truman, but go by the name Lain Himmelreich most of the time. If we had a son named William Edward Himmelreich-Truman, he would go by Eddie Truman. If my daughter married some guy named John Smith, she would lose the Truman, add the Smith, and her children would be Truman-Smith. If Ted married a girl named Jones, he would change his full name Jones-Truman. And this would continue from generation to generation.

The advantage of this situation is that it would allow for legacy names for women. I am the fourth William ______ Truman in my line. But women can’t do that as easily because their names are always subject to change and even if they don’t change their name the daughters will take their father’s name. Unlike common hyphenation, this is sustainable over generations. Each have their name but there is also a collective, family name. It may sound a bit confusing at first, but it’s something that I would expect people to get used to pretty quickly.

So is that something that Clancy and I are going to do? Well no, because it’s one of those things that only works when everybody else does it. I have no desire to be a domestic trailblazer. Further, since nobody else does it, it would invariably lead to assumptions that any daughters I have are stepchildren because while mothers having different last names as their children is not unheard of (due to not changing their name or divorce and remarriage), the same is not true of fathers. Mostly, though, it’s the trailblazer thing and a desire not to use my family to express my dissent from tradition. If I have a daughter that makes the decision to trailblaze by taking her mother’s name (when she turns 18), I won’t object.

* – Actually, she likes me having facial hair more than I do. She doesn’t like it when I shave. The point being, though, that a moustache is not a compromise because it’s more different from clean-shaven than it is from bearded and besideswhich nobody likes moustaches and they look particularly retarded on me.

** – Oh, and our actual last names do not, shall we say, roll off the tongue. Even less so than Himmelreich-Truman.

Anyone have any brand and model HDTVs to endorse? It’s kind of high on our list of things to get when the money starts rolling in (don’t worry, a big chunk of it is going right into savings). I’m looking for somewhere in the ballpark of 32″ to 42″. That’s a big ballpark, I know. I’m indecisive. Extra points for TVs with good 180 degree visibility and particularly for TVs with minimum glare as the TV will be facing a window.

The NFL has passed a new rule that governs playoff overtimes. The NFL’s previous rules were that there was a coin toss and whichever team scored first would win. This gave an advantage to the receiving team. Particularly after 1994, when they moved the kickoff from the 35 yard line to the 30 yard line. Since then, 60% of games are won by whichever team wins the toss. The new rules state that each team gets at least one possession of the ball unless the team that gets the ball first scores a touchdown. This is meant to mitigate the increased advantage of the receiving team because of improvements among NFL kickers.

These rules only apply during the playoff, which some people view as a flaw because they believe that the rules should be the same between the regular season and the playoffs. That’s a non-issue for me because they’re already different (playoff games can’t end in a tie, regular season games can) and have historically been different (it used to be that there was no overtime in the regular season. Others believe that they should just go with the NCAA formula. I will get to that objection in a minute.

I don’t like the plan because it’s a remarkably indirect and arbitrary way to solve the problem. Now, when it comes to sports rules, arbitrariness is to some degree unavoidable. Even so, the rules state that if each team scores a field goal then the next team that scores wins. Why not do that for touchdowns, too? Or if the fear is that two touchdowns plus at least one more possession will drag on too long, force the second team to score a touchdown and get a two-point conversion? I think that fans would find it considerably more satisfying if they knew that each team would get a possession, even if it doesn’t change the coinflip advantage. Of course, as something of a traditionalist I would prefer they not change the rules any more than they have to. If moving the kickoff from the 35 yard line to the 30 shifted the advantage to the coinflip winners, move it to the 40 yard line and go forward with the sudden death rule.

One thing that I am glad they avoided the temptation of is going with the NCAA rules. They are a mess. The NCAA rules are certainly more “fair” than the NFL rules, but they ran havoc over scoring and record integrity. It used to be that if you saw a game that was 63 to 62, you knew that was one high-flying, exciting game. Now it might just mean that they went into overtime. That’s exciting, of course, but it makes the defenses look worse than they are and the offenses look better. Further, it gives quarterbacks and receivers and running backs touchdowns that the offense didn’t really earn. That happens anyway with turnovers, but at least in that case the defense earned it. As it stands now, they were spotted 75 yards and given full credit.

They could have avoided this with one tweak: don’t give the teams full TD and field goal credit. Make an OT touchdown worth three points and a field goal worth two. That strikes me as pretty fair since they didn’t earn the points (either through offensive movement or defensive turnover or field position jockeying). It is a variation of the extra point and two-point conversion. They only give teams partial credit on those because they were spotted 97 yards. Since scoring from the 25 is harder than scoring from the 3, they should get more than a point or two. But not much more, really. Further, the field goals and touchdowns in OT wouldn’t count towards statistics and records. Which they shouldn’t.

I wouldn’t actually want the NFL to do what the NCAA is doing, though. As with post-season rituals, different leagues should have different systems.