Be it your best friend, your dog, cat, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, and all that exists in between. How did you meet them?
Be it your best friend, your dog, cat, boyfriend, girlfriend, wife, husband, and all that exists in between. How did you meet them?
She lived in an entirely different city across the country (Europe, so like two hours of train ride).
She saw me on Facebook, based on photos from a goth festival in our city, so I got a message on Messanger from a profile without a profile picture and no mutual friends. We talked for a bit, I was single at the time, and we eventually decided to meet. I had no idea how she looks like, and I kind of found this idea of a blind date funny - either it works, or I’ll get a good story out of it.
We decided to meet and go to a local goth scene hangout, and not only she was really pretty, she also brought two bottles of mead. We managed to drink both of them before even getting to the hangout, where it turned out that she was actually not only a classmate of my best friend (a long time ago), but also used to be part of the scene around 5 years ago (before I joined it), before she went no-contact and changed her nickname due to a relationship (that eventually turned out really terrible). So, she knew most of my friends.
That was 7 years ago. At the time she was living in a small flat, after just getting out of a 7 y.o terrible relationship that she couldn’t leave due to having a mortgage, but she managed to save enough on a minimal wage to leave when she found out he was cheating. Her grandma was living with her in her small flat, and she was really a terrible person, even had her aunt with the most entitled child move in, and they were even worse. Always arguing, screaming, being rude, and just acting like dicks. She let them live with her, just because they had nowhere to go, even though she was earning a minimal wage. Them saying that “If we don’t like it, we should move out”, or that “I shouldn’t argue, because I don’t live here”, while I was actually helping her with rent they weren’t doing anything for was insane.
I kept visiting her almost daily, spending time in the one small 5x5m room she had for herself, even though it was two hour train ride. During covid, I was mostly staying at her place, and since she loved animals (her mother worked at a zoo, before cancer got her), we discussed what we want to get, and pet racoon was high on the list. And when she said that we will get a racoon once we live together, I immediately found a flat in my city, and we moved in together around 5 years ago. We stole the ashes of her mother and went no-contact with the people living at her old flat. They can burn in hell.
Unfortunately, racoons are not easily legal to own, but we got a lot of different animals instead. She also helped me with starting to make our own goth events, DJ, and help local promoters, and now we’re responsible for more than half of goth events that happen in our city. She’s now earning more that I do (and I work in IT), and I’m really happy how did everything turned out. We have no idea how did the rest of her familly end up, but we don’t really care.
We are kind of planning a wedding, with only witnesses, but so far what’s stopping is that I can’t find my birth certificate, and that it looks like it’s not possible for both of us to have both surnames (the options are one of us keeps theirs, and the other get’s both, or we choose one only, and we both want to have both), so we kind of didn’t want to bother with it for a while.
Why would you not both be able to take both names? Is there some archaic, patriarchal law getting in the way?
When I was looking through the official marriage papers you submit when oficially requesting marriage, to see what I need to do if we would want to get married, that option simply wasn’t there in the checkboxes. And I asked for clarification, and apparently our laws don’t allow that combination, at least not as a part of the marriage process.
I haven’t really looked into it more, and a friend told me it’s very probable that we could just choose one of the available options and then submit a separate request to change my surename to add the missing one. It was also more than a year ago, and someone also told me that our marriage laws did go through a revision recently and it might be actually possible to choose both for both now. I’ll have to re-check again, but I’m certain that at least last year, it wasn’t possible.
Oh, one option I found a funny loophole was that we could marry, she’d take both, then divorce while keeping our new surenames (so she still has both), then marry again and I’d take both. I would end up with three surenames, mine twice (since she already has both, and I’m keeping mine and taking her current at the point of second marriage), but while that would be pretty funny, realistically it’s easier to just file for a surename change after wedding :D
As for the reason, who knows? But an ancient patriarchic custom is probably the reason, I’d guess that especially historically it’s not really common for a man to take his wife surename in general, and usually it’s just the bride either taking the man’s or keeping both.