Philosophers, linguists, and social scientists have spent more than 2,500 years trying to define the nature and function of names; I have spent nearly two decades trying to do something similar. My interest/borderline obsession with names started, as many things do, with a love story.
It was the end of 2007 when my then-boyfriend/now-husband and I decided to get married. It was, in fact, a decision, not a proposal, and it happened in a bar. Somehow, one of us shouted out that we should get married, and the other shouted back in agreement. After a few minutes of excited conversation, we realized we were both serious…and getting married. We left the bar and did a half-skip, half-run all the way home.
For someone who didn’t dream about weddings or proposals, this decision was perfect for me. Proposals made me anxious. Once, while living in North Carolina, I came home to our duplex covered in candles, with Sade playing on the speaker. My heart pounded outside my chest because I thought he was proposing. He wasn’t. He just wanted to get laid, a revelation that made me laugh in relief. The idea that a woman needs to wait for a man to ask her to get married feels off-putting and outdated, like girdles and corsets. Not to mention the pressure this puts on both parties. It felt like a game, and I had no interest in playing.
Wedding planning felt similar. Despite my parents’ efforts to play by established rules, I opted to play my own way, thanks to a friend who got me the Anti-Bride Guide book. I realized I didn’t have to get caught up in wedding planning hoopla or do every typical wedding tradition. It wasn’t until a few months into the wedding planning, on a walk home from work, that I was confronted with a marriage tradition I had never anticipated.
It was a chilly April day, and I was talking on the phone with a friend who was 1,500 miles away. As I strolled past a bakery, hair salon, and park, we chit-chatted about wedding dresses I had looked at, where we were thinking of going on our honeymoon, and the challenges of planning a small, intimate wedding with parents whose guest list kept growing. When I was a block from my house, she said, “Well, Mrs. Miranda, I have to go, but it’s been nice chatting with you.” I stopped in my tracks. Literally. My name was Lori Axler; hearing this other name - a name that belonged to my boyfriend - felt like a punch in the stomach. I choked on whatever words I said back to her before floating home. I don’t remember specifically what I said nor any other details of that day, but I remember floating home in a body so numb I couldn’t feel it touch the ground.
This was the first time I thought about my name and my relationship to it. This is where it all began.
I soon learned that nearly everyone in my orbit, including my non-traditional, fairly progressive partner, assumed the same thing. It was just what women did when they got married, so everyone thought I would do the same. I was the only one who had never thought about it…at least not since sixth grade when I would doodle Lori and the last name of my crush-of-the-moment on my book covers (why they made ‘80s and ‘90s children cover their schoolbooks in brown grocery sack paper is beyond me).
Since then, it occupied zero real estate in my mind.
I didn’t think about it, not because I was against it but because I had never thought about it. This feels ridiculous to me now, considering how many weddings I attended before this point in time. All those brides changed their names - some of them leaping into their new names with “Mrs.” robes or new email address notifications before the “I do’s” were said. More time and care were spent on the hors d'oeuvres than what their name would be for, presumably, eternity, but, somehow, I never noticed. No one ever talked about it.
They talked about chair covers, save-the-dates, floral arrangements, and the nail polish color their bridesmaids would wear. Bridal magazines covered everything from etiquette to underwear. There were pages and pages dedicated to overpriced dresses that would be worn once. Not one of those conversations or articles mentioned anything about name changes, something so fundamentally tied to identity and personhood. Something that will outlast the flowers and hors d'oeuvres.
While no one else wanted to talk about it, it suddenly became my main area of interest. My focus began with the tradition of women taking their husbands’ names, but the lens quickly widened. It was like discovering a new world far more complex than I realized, with names touching every aspect of humanity. I wanted to seek out and examine every crevice. I wanted to understand the power and meaning that names held. I began viewing the world through the lens of names.
This reminds me of a story from my husband’s undergrad studies. He was part of a project that helped Americans prepare for jobs in another culture. They would explain that, as Americans, we see things through one set of lenses. Let’s say those are blue lenses. The other culture sees things through another set of lenses; we will call them yellow. After enough time in that culture, you will also start to see through yellow lenses, but you still have your blue ones on. You can’t take those off - they are part of you. And now the yellow ones are, too. With the yellow lenses layered over the blue ones, you won’t see pure yellow, and you won’t see pure blue. You will look at the world through a combination of both lenses - the identity, culture, and beliefs to which you grew up and the new identity, culture, and beliefs to which you are now exposed. You will see green.
Ever since that walk home on a cold April day, I have viewed the world through the lens of names. I see them in everything, like when you get a new car, and you start seeing the same make and model on every road and highway. What we pay attention to, we see everywhere. For me, it’s names and their impact on us.
It’s on the stack of name tags at a back-to-school event for my kids’ school. It’s in the book I am reading about female slaveholders and the fiction classic I just finished. It’s on that trip to Ellis Island a few years back, and the Chinese friend of my husband from years ago, who we only know by his Western name. It’s in the ways we memorialize people on gravestones, structures, and hashtags. It’s in the room where I comfort a friend going through a divorce. It’s in the ancestry.com rabbit hole my husband once went down, and it’s in the phone calls I make and the forms I fill out. Names and their significance are everywhere. I’ve spent almost every day since that cold April day noticing this. I am fascinated, captivated, and forever tethered to it.
I used to walk around with blue glasses, seeing the world as I once only knew it. Then, someone referred to me by a different name, and I began to see things differently. For the past 15 years, I have looked at the world with a new lens, seeing complex layers, thousands of years of history, and millions of individual and collective stories. It’s not even a choice; I can’t not see these things. I’m like an American living abroad, enmeshed in the culture. I now see green.
Phil and i discussed baby girl names while i was pregnant. We both liked Alexa, mind you this was 2013 before Amazon made that name famous. We are so glad we dodged that bullet!
Love reading your entries Mrs. Axler/Miranda. Look forward to many more 👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼