The information simply didn't compute for my husband's friend. Let's call him Bill.
"What, did you lose a fight with Cait?"
No, he didn't lose a fight with me.
"Do you just not like your last name or something?"
No, my husband is perfectly fine with his last name. Well, half of his last name, now.
Mark and I came to the decision to hyphenate our respective names separately, which is unusual for us. He and I tend to talk about everything-- in a good way. In such a way that when he had to go to India for two weeks on a work trip, I would come home to our empty house at loose ends, brimming with those dumb little nothings that happen in my day and not having anywhere to put them. The cats, suffice to say, aren't great listeners.
My not asking Mark about hyphenating springs from an unfortunate, though rapidly waning, tendency I have: sometimes I assume that Mark will respond to certain cues in the way that other people have typically responded in my life. Even though Mark has unequivocally proven that he is nothing like anybody I've ever met before (including and especially the guys I've dated before), it's like a muscle memory to unconsciously project those less than stellar expectations. I'm trying to break the habit, because it's wildly unfair to him and just plain inaccurate.
Speaking specifically, I spent a very regrettable (literally-- I regret it a lot) portion of my twenties if not apologizing for being a feminist, then certainly not leading with it. I outgrew that habit in graduate school for two reasons: first, a feminist methodologies class changed my thesis and my life, and second, I got really tired of pretending to be anything other than who I am, even if that meant being alone. And based on that pesky previous experience, being precisely who I am would mean I would be going it alone.
My best friend, who never lost faith, told me once that all the things about me that scared all the boys away would be the things my man would love the most. She was right: that I was a scotch-drinking, pixie-haired, Doctor Who-watching feminist put off almost every guy I met on any dating site. And really, truly, thank God for that, because when Mark came across me and all of those characteristics, it was like the universe yelled, "YAHTZEE!"
Mark himself is an amazing feminist. Injustice of any variety-- including gender injustice-- makes him viscerally furious. He believes that all people are people and that no one gets the right to force their stupidity or prejudices on anybody else (also: amen).
So that I was nervous about asking this man, my then future husband, if he'd be willing to hyphenate, says a lot more about me and my baggage than it does about him.
The subject came up while we were out to dinner with some friends at a speak-easy type restaurant in Back Bay. One half of our dinner pair was one of my oldest college friends, who had changed her name when they got married. Carrie casually asked in the course of conversation if I would hyphenate, change my name, or none of the above.
"I think I'll hyphenate," I answered. I had already planned on doing so.
"Yeah, me too," Mark chimed in from my other side.
There was a nearly audible clonk as my jaw hit the table. I proceeded to make a series of high pitched, aborted squeaky noises before I managed to say, "You will?"
He shrugged like it was the most obvious thing in the world and said, "Well yeah. We're a unit. We're a family."
I remember the moment with such astounding clarity, right down to the fact that I was inexplicably eating an appetizer portion of bone marrow (it was lovely, but sort of beside the point).
Mark had said it like it was the most obvious thing in the world, possibly-- and importantly-- because, in fact, it was the most obvious thing in the world. One of my favorite bits of vestigial trivia from my days as an avid student of Latin is the derivation of the word "obvious." It comes from two roots: the preposition "ob," which more or less means "up against" or "immediately before." The second root is the noun "via," meaning way or street. So, literally, "obvious" means "right up against your way," or more colloquially, "this thing is so very much right there in front of you that you're going to trip on it and fall on your ass."
So here are my husband's kindness, his fair mindedness, his feminism, his general belief in the importance of not being crappy to people, and his mind-bending, paradigm-shifting, and still butterfly-inducing love for me-- and I trip over them in their obviousness and fall directly onto my ass. And never have I been more glad to be sitting there in the middle of the metaphorical road, looking up in bemused amazement at the best noun-- person, place, or thing-- that has ever happened to me.
Mark is also pretty accustomed by now to my periodically falling on both my actual and metaphorical ass, and is in both cases always ready to pick me back up.
To bring it full circle, it's worth noting that the aforementioned Bill-- who was so appalled that Mark would change his name of his own volition-- is not one of the most enlightened or discerning people I've ever met. But you know what? I didn't marry him. I married Mark. Because no matter how many stupid people there are in the world, no matter how many of them I may have dated, Mark isn't any of them. Mark isn't anybody but himself, and who he is is the most remarkable human being I've ever met; he's also my husband, my unit, my family, my home.
And now he's someone with the same last name as me, and someone whom I love so much that everything I start to write turns into a love letter, almost without my noticing.
