More stuff on name changes

[cosmolinguist]

I left a comment on andrewducker's LJ, in reply to someone saying he was baffled that his mother addresses stuff to his wife as Mrs. HisLastName, when she didn't change her name. "It's baffling," he said.

My reply ended up getting so long and involved I figured I might as well put it here.


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I had an interesting conversation with a friend of my mom's, L, about a person roughly my age (20s-30s) who's just gotten married and not changed her name. L told me that this person was frustrated at people addressing her as Mrs. Husbandsname (or addressing them as a couple as Mr. & Mrs. Husbandsname, with no mention of her names anywhere!). L understood the frustration intellectually but she said in practice it was very difficult for her to not address a married woman as Mrs. Husbandsname; it went against everything she'd been taught about being polite and respectful.
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As far as I can tell (though I may be misrepresenting this as it's foreign to me), L and my mom and their generation were led to believe that there are hard and fast rules about what is and what isn't polite, and that these rules apply to everyone. Respect or offense can therefore be implied and inferred solely from manners.‎ 

And so they find it hard to extract the intention from the act. I tried to help L separate her good intention -- to be respectful -- from the thing she'd customarily do to show that respect. It was a big leap for her: clearly until quite recently she had no need for a distinction between a desire to show respect and an action that went along with it. And she could be confident that the respect would universally be understood and appreciated as such because everybody she was likely to interact with knew the same rules she did. But now, suddenly the polite act would not necessarily be taken as it was intended. 
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I think it must seem very weird, to have these rules that have served you well most of your sixty-some years on the planet subverted by a subsequent generation who emphasize the importance of context and personal preference. It can look like swapping a bedrock foundation of certainty for a vague, nebulous world where you have to work out everything afresh for each new person you interact with. My mom and her friends are fundamentally nice people; they don't enjoy going against someone's ‎explicit wishes, but the bone-deep indoctrination and decades-long habit of "good manners" is going to cause some distress, some cognitive dissonance, if they defy it, especially if they feel they have to leave their bedrock and move to constantly shifting sands.

This kind of cognitive dissonance is going to happen with any culture-clash, of course, but I think it's especially profound when it's to do with politeness and manners. Because manners exist to keep us from having to think too much about how we interact with people, as the point of them is to offer a pre-ordained way to deal with pretty much anything. They allow us to tell ourselves "well, I don't know why Mrs. Husbandsname was so upset, I was doing my best! I was trying, wasn't I? I only want to be nice!" We can avoid as much responsibility for the effects of our behavior as we like, safe in the knowledge that we can blame the vague authority of manners which, being bigger than any one of us, knows better than we do what's good for us.
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So I can't say it baffles me. I don't like it, but I do understand it. And I'm grateful it only took me a year after I got married for my mom and my grandma to stop calling me Mrs. Hickey.‎

Comments

[quirkytizzy]

This is actually an incredibly astute and insightful deconstruction of what we're seeing in society today - an older generation for whom "polite" means going against decades of tradition. Caught between two worlds of expectation, as it were.

I had not considered this aspect of it. Brilliantly put!

[cosmolinguist]

Thanks! I do spend a lot of time thinking about how to reconcile what's important to me with what's important to some of the people important to me -- namely my family and the people I grew up around. (I am not sure how much what I say here generalizes; I think it works only when enough people are similar enough in various demographic categories and life experiences that you basically can get by on assuming that they think what you think and care about what you care about.)

There's a lot of cognitive dissonance on my side, too, and I did think this kind of behavior was baffling for a long time too. I've only recently started to think about this enough to be able to articulate what I did here. I do think they're nice people and they want to do good, and it helps me if I can see how sincere they are in that intention while still sometimes falling so far short of the niceness they're aiming for.

[rmc28]

I think maybe it's easier to reach people if you treat their (baffling/annoying/frustrating) actions as arising from good intentions, rather than treating them as Evil People Who Are Trying To Hurt Me.

But you have to care enough about people to want to reach them, and I can understand why people who are hurt don't feel they should have to do all the work too.

[cosmolinguist]

Oh I understand that too. This is work that I feel is worth putting in for a few people I've known all my life. I don't do this for everyone and I wouldn't expect anyone else necessarily do it at all. Because it certainly is a lot of work, and the kinds of this work that I can do are a lot easier than the kinds that don't apply to me, since I'm relatively privileged.

[rmc28]

I do want to believe people are not trying to be rude, even after being told repeatedly they are.

On the other hand, many women now in their 60s (i.e. my mother's generation) were keeping their own names on marriage. Ok, not my own mother. But my stepsister's mother, and her aunt, and several teachers and lecturers of mine. So it is frustrating to me to deal with women of that generation acting as though it is a totally new thing for women to keep their name.

On the third hand, I assumed when I got engaged I would change my name entirely, even though if I'd been asked, I've said of course it was perfectly fine for [other] people not to. So I'd absorbed the conditioning to some extent anyway.

[andrewhickey.info]

In the case of Holly's parents, though, they come from a *very* socially-conservative, religious, insular community. The idea that I wasn't going to wear a wedding ring, for example, was *hugely* confusing to them (whereas it never occured to me that I might have one). I don't think they'd ever, in their lives, encountered anyone who seriously deviated from their lifestyle, and they're still constantly baffled by tiny differences between Britain and America when they come over here.

It is entirely believable to me that they never before encountered the idea of women not changing their name, except maybe as one of those strange things that people on the coasts do. It's certainly more forgivable in them than, say, Daily Mail reporters repeatedly referring to Miriam Gonzales Durantez as Mirian Clegg...

[rmc28]

Thank you. Though, being able to forgive Holly's parents more easily than forgiving the Daily Mail isn't the highest of bars :-)

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah, hence me saying that I am not sure how much my observations generalize, because I really do think in places like the rural Midwest it's possible for such obstructionism to be genuinely a matter of confusion or discomfort with something utterly new, rather than having any malice or stubborn obliviousness in it at all.

[cartesiandaemon.livejournal.com]

That's a really interesting explanation, and makes a lot of sense, both why people tend to do that, and the drawbacks to it.

I'm so used to the idea of "respect what people want to be called" I forget why it might be odd. I think there are good reasons for that, not just changing fashions in politeness, because it's useful for not being horribly bigoted to new ideas, but it might have drawbacks too.

Now I'm wondering, when I'm 60, what things I'll do that will be unacceptable. Will I respect people's opinions when the right thing to do is to respect their responsibilities more? Or something else completely?

[cosmolinguist]

Oh I do think there are good intrinsic reasons for respecting what people want to be called, not just that it's on trend. :)

I think the system my mom and L and the others like them use can only work as well as it does because they live in a small community where very nearly everyone grew up there or somewhere like it, where people are similar enough that you can get by on assuming that they think like you and they care about what you care about. You won't be wrong often enough to question that too much.

So it's not a very flexible system. It doesn't take much at all for it to break down. Calling people what they want is much more robust and scales up to a wider number of cases -- indeed all of them, as far as I can tell, though as you say there are probably some drawbacks in our system somewhere that we're not seeing yet. I look forward to them being pointed out by a fed-up younger generation in a few decades. :)

There's a lovely book called Lost Worlds by Michael Bywater which has as part of its thesis "What are we doing now - discerning and elegant as we are - that our descendants will laugh at, and wonder why? And how can we tell?"

[uglybuffy.livejournal.com]

I didn't officially change my name. I like it when Wayne calls me Mrs Blemings, and the novelty of writing "To Mr Blemings, from Mrs Blemings" on cards hasn't worn off. I think of myself as Sarah Mac Fhearadhaigh Blemings, but privately - that is my name on facebook but I kept my own name at work, on my bank cards, driving licence, passport etc. I don't really mind when post comes to Mrs Blemings - although it makes it difficult picking up parcels at the post office as all my ID has my maiden name on it. My mother and Wayne's mother are scandalised, as we had to return a cheque made payable to Mr and Mrs Blemings after the wedding - but then we would have had to do that anyway as we don't have a joint account. Plus Blemings is an unusual name and I would rather clients etc weren't able to find me on Facebook. Mac Fhearadhaigh is the Irish for my surname so they can't find me currently!