As a woman with very little interest in getting married, I have long struggled to understand why it's so important for heterosexual women to adopt a name that isn't theirs. Even more, it troubles me that conversations on this tradition of taking a man's name after marriage are now difficult to have without defensiveness being mounted from either side.

Prompt a conversation on the topic, and more often than not you'll be met with angered cries that not only does the discussion equate to criticism, but that there can be nothing less feminist that criticising women's "choices". Comment threads under articles about marriage and names tend to be filled with outraged people eager to explain why their choice was different, more feminist, less subject to social conditioning. I wasn't forced to, someone might argue. It was my choice - and isn't feminism about choice?

Bride Credit:Stocksy

If a simple matter of choice was really at the crux of why many more women than men adopt their partners' surname on marriage, we would see it being reciprocated. We would hear men offering multiple reasons about how they were eager to let go of their last name: the oft-cited "difficult to spell and/or pronounce" surname, for example, or the fractured relationship with one's father. As we only tend to hear these justifications offered by women, we are left with two possible explanations for why this might be happening. Either it is only women who end up saddled with hard-to-pronounce names and terrible fathers (unlikely) or these are instead excuses offered to soften the blow of what seems in other respects to be an intellectually unsound choice.

Pose this to anyone defending the practice and they might say, "Well, what difference does it make? You have your father's name anyway, so it's one or the other."