When love don’t cost a thing… except your name
Jennifer Lopez. JLo. Jenny from the Block. Why did a star with such a wealth of recognisable monikers choose to become Mrs Affleck?
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“Jen, what’s your name?” my dad asked.
My initial reaction was to assume he’d gone slightly doolally. What’s my name? Eh?
“I mean, officially,” he clarified. “Are you still Jennifer Crichton or are you now Crichton-Vase?”
“She’s Jenni from The Flock”, my husband quipped, returning to scrolling his phone with a wry smile. He knows it’s not my favourite conversation.
Since getting married last November, I’ve been asked dozens of times about my name. Not by my dad, I should clarify – turns out, he was only checking because he was trying to add me to his car insurance – but by others. Strangers. Friends. Family members. All are keen to know whether Rich gifted me a new moniker when we said I do. Every time, I ponder how I feel about having a different name to both my husband and son. Then I get more confused – and seethe slightly at the fact it’s a query only ever aimed at one of us.
Sure, it’s 2022 and the world is an ever-moving hellscape, but some things never change – and the assumption that it will be a woman who changes her name after marriage remains as certain as death and taxes. It’s as predictable a conversation as it is patriarchal, yet there remain some people you’d assume it wouldn’t apply to. The Queen, for example. Beyonce. Jennifer Lopez. Turns out, that assumption would be wrong.
For amid the excitement of JLo’s marriage to Ben Affleck this week – A 20-year journey down the aisle! Two dresses! A Vegas elopement! – the biggest talking point was the revelation that Lopez had immediately, legally, changed her name to Jennifer Affleck.
More accurately, the big question on everyone’s lips was ‘why?’
As the comedian Katherine Ryan suggested in her now viral Tweet, ‘Jennifer Lopez’ was more than a name. It was a brand. It was the glue that bound a career record spanning movies and music, endless awards, the presidential inauguration and that Super Bowl performance. Jenny from the Block was the sort of take-no-prisoners badass who’d pole-dance in a leotard on the world’s biggest stage at the age of 50 and absolutely nail it. And now, at 52, she’s Mrs Jennifer Affleck. JAf? JFleck? WTF?
While I’d be inclined to think her CV was reason enough for Lopez to eschew senseless tradition, or convince the other half of team Bennifer to do her a solid and change his name, it’s not the only reason her decision gave me pause.
Because while I’m all for personal choice – it’s the assumption I have a problem with – I know from painful experience that reclaiming your name if it all goes wrong is infinitely harder than taking a man’s. I divorced once and swore I’d never change my name again. Lopez has been through divorce three times and just jumped right in. I guess the main source of my confusion is how she can be arsed…
Back in 2010, despite being deeply reluctant to give Crichton up, I took my first husband’s name.
To say that my name had been a huge part of my identity to that point is to understate it a bit. Our names are our identities. My own achievements might have been infinitely less impressive than JLo’s, but every success and failure I had fought through, every school exam, university lecture, friendship and doomed romance I had experienced, every byline I had fought for as a young journalist, had been as a Crichton. It is the name of my parents, my late grandparents, my past and my future. Yet as a younger, less confident woman, having initially taken a half-hearted one name at home, another at work approach, I caved. I was a wife, after all, and wives get new names.
Today, I look back on that decision and I curse my naivety. For while giving my name up was, in a strictly procedural sense, incredibly easy – sign here, become a new person – getting my real name back was a bureaucratic nightmare so lengthy, convoluted and stressful that I still come out in hives every time I think about it. Even the language gives me the shivers. By reclaiming my maiden name am I, once again, a maiden? At what point does it become one’s old maid’s name? I digress…
The point is, giving up your name in the heat of romance is easy. But it’s not an act that is easily reversed.
For me, the waiting time between separation and divorce was a strange sort of purgatory, a period where I could pay my own damn bills, but it was still my ex-husband’s name on them. And while I appreciate JFleck is unlikely to find herself in tears in the Post Office queue as I did – even if it did all go wrong, admin is probably something she’s somewhat more able to delegate – the unfairness of the whole identity-shifting process was enough to make me swear off Deed Poll docs forever. And while I certainly don’t expect superstars to agree with me as a matter of habit, I can’t help but wonder what made Mrs Affleck jump right in with the surname sub.
Perhaps, I’m overthinking it and, after waiting 20 years for their happily ever after, this is simply a way for Jen to say she’s all in. Maybe, after three marriages and two broken engagements, she’s covered enough hard yards to know that, this time, it’s for keeps. Certainly, I think those who’ve been through the wringer of the divorce courts are more cautious in giving our hearts away – even when our relationships aren’t front page news.
But however much I love a love story, I do wish we’d start shaking off the more limiting traditions of marriage, focus less on whether he puts a ring on it and more on which name has the best ring to it, whether his, hers or an amalgamation of the two. After all, Bennifer were the original portmanteau couple, paving the way for Brangelina, Kimye et al. What better pair to give us a combo surname?
Perhaps in an age somewhat lacking in optimism, we should just be grateful to them for bringing some much-needed joy to the world. After all, a piece of paper can’t rewrite a stellar record – and even the Little White Wedding Chapel’s Elvis couldn’t outshine that Super Bowl performance.
Call her what you like, she’s still Jenny from the Block.
Did you take your husband’s name? Did he take yours? Did you find a third way? I’d love to hear your thoughts – and, as ever, if you enjoyed this newsletter, please do share it and help spread the word…
I took my husbands name 25 years ago, and no one questioned me or my friends at the time. It was the 90’s. But would I do today? And my daughter, who is 22 and not even in a relationship so isn’t marching down any aisle any time soon, I wonder what I and my husband will advise her.
It is a system designed by men for men, particularly with the suffix - if you aren’t a Mrs, then does a Miss suffice because Ms just sounds downright dowdy! Boys are Mr and stay Mr throughout their life - married or not. It is right that we challenge this, though, because this expected name change goes back to a time when women had no rights - could own no land or have a bank account or be protected from their husbands violence.
I remember having a massive existential crisis about 3 months out from my wedding. I was so confused. My husband felt that as I had a brother who would keep the family name then I ought to take his because he was the last boy! I succumbed and I do like the fact that we have a family identity. We couldn’t double-barrel we have far to many syllables between us.
I still feel funny about it sometimes and my own family often forget, my nickname was JP as a kid which was my initials and I still get called that by them.
Rarely in the real world does anyone use my last name, except I work at a school. I am not a teacher and I often joke with the pupils that they should call me Jo not Mrs Mullineux, that is my mother-in-law!! Which is weird when I think about it because she will have given up her name, in fact she did it twice because she was widowed and then married my father-in-law.
It is a really tricky one and all the more complicated if you have children which I don’t. I often wonder if we ought to have come up with a completely new name when we got married and both changed to that. In reality admin would have killed that!!