We're The New Us!

We officially have permission for Reto to take my surname (aka our shiny new surname) after the wedding! Hurray! Not that anyone really thought that this permission would be denied us, but it's nice to have written assurance that me changing my surname wasn't in vain, and also something that we can take to the Swiss Consulate in Sydney after the wedding so that they don't make any trouble for us.

Anyway, now that I have spent the last few weeks posting certified copies of my brand new birth certificate all over town and getting my name changed on my frequent flier programme and so on, Reto has finally starting the process of being faced with actually changing his surname (which really was pretty weird at first for me) and of all the dull bureaucratic hoo-haa of getting a new passport, drivers license, credit card and so on, and he seems as tentative about it as I used to (which is not very tentative, but it really is quite an annoying process).

He also had a google around and found some article in a Swiss newspaper from a few years ago talking about how apparently the Switzies are looking into changing the rules about married names, so that the default position is that you both keep your own name, but that you can still choose to have a common family name if you want to. There were also, apparently, a few statistics in there about the number of newly married couples in the canton of Zurich who choose to take the wife's surname instead of the husband's (something around 200 out of the 7000 marrying couples in 2005, I think) and an article about how emasculating this must be for the men! For crying out loud! What a poor sad bunch of delicate flowers these menfolk must be.

Personally I think it says a lot more about the journalist's sense of self than it does anyone else's.