Long Island couples are torn on changing their last names after marriage 

When Ericka Bolte, of Valley Stream, marries Eric McGuinness, of Merrick, at the Long Island Aquarium in October — the same place where he proposed with the help of a waddling penguin wearing a “Marry Me” bow tie — Bolte expects that many things in her life will change.

But one thing that used to be a routine transformation won’t happen — Bolte won’t take her husband’s last name.

“I decided years ago, probably back when I was in high school, I wasn’t going to change my name,” says Bolte, 37, an insurance agent. “I feel like I’ve been on a journey with it, so I don’t want to give it up at this point. Luckily, I have a partner who totally gets that.”

Many newlyweds-to-be flip-flop about flowers, sweat about seating arrangements, go back and forth about whether to have the ceremony indoors or out. But whether to change a last name is a more weighty and lasting decision. It's a tradition some Long Island couples consider outdated while others continue to embrace. Three issues repeatedly come up that affect what a spouse elects to do, they say — how strongly they feel their birth surname is part of their identity, how established they are in careers, and how important it is to them to share the same name as their partner and future children.

For LGBTQ+ couples, the decision is more complex because there is no traditional path. When Bidania and Dee Criscuolo, of Massapequa, married in 2013, Bidania, 35, took Dee's last name, which Dee, 48, called a “very special” choice.

“We really wanted to keep the family name because she was an only child,” explains Bidania, a social worker. “I wanted to take her last name and give it to our children.” She and Dee, a police officer, now have two, ages 8 and 9.

TWO SISTERS, TWO CHOICES

Couples make the choice about a name change when they apply for a marriage license at their local town hall. “When you fill out your marriage license, you then express the way you want it to be,” says Brookhaven Town Clerk Kevin LaValle. Then, when a couple receives their final marriage certificate after their ceremony, the spouse changing their name can use the certificate as proof to change other documents such as their driver's license and credit cards, he says.

The State of New York Department of Health doesn't track how many people change their names upon marriage, says public information officer Erin Clary. The Department of Motor Vehicles also does not have data on name changes for spouses, says public information officer Pete Bucci. Barbara Hanna, deputy town clerk for the town of Huntington, says that anecdotally, “the majority take the husband's last name.”

That was Jen Salta's original intention. 

“I had really fully planned to change it. My whole life I didn’t think it would be a big issue for me,” says Salta, 35, a jewelry designer and artist from Huntington who married in 2017 at the age of 27. “When it came time to change it, suddenly I felt it was very old fashioned. It felt a little bit like erasure of me as a person.”

In addition to the fact that Salta had established her jewelry business under her maiden name, husband Brett’s last name was not a simple one. “My husband’s last name is Oppedisano, which is a mouthful,” Salta says. The couple talked about combining their names into a new last name, but ultimately didn’t, she says.

Salta’s older sister, Danielle Middleton, of Glen Head, made the opposite decision when she got married, taking the last name of her husband, Brian, now 38 and an IT professional.

“I did feel a lot of pressure to change my name,” says Middleton, 38 and a stay-at-home mother with a degree in arts therapy. When she would mention keeping her birth name, people would say, “Isn’t that insulting to Brian?” she says. “I didn’t do it because I had a really strong urge to change my name. I kind of just went with the flow.”

It felt strange, she says, that her name changed what people assumed about her ethnicity. “It was always part of my identity to be Italian. Now I’m English.” People will jokingly ask her if she’s related to Princess Kate. “I wish,” she says. But she's happy with her decision, she says, especially now that she has three children, ages 8, 7 and 4. “I do feel like it unifies the family. I do like when I go places, my name is the same name as the kids.”

ALTERNATIVES EASIER NOW

Jenny Caruso, 39, wanted to make her maiden name her middle name and add her husband’s last name when she and Paul Hinchey, 40, an assistant principal, went to the town of Huntington to get their marriage license in 2017. “I couldn’t do it when I applied for the license,” she says. “It was not an option.”

The law has since changed, allowing for more alternatives, such as adding a spouse's last name without having to drop a maiden name or add a hyphen, says Huntington Town Clerk Andrew Raia.

But at the time, Caruso would only have been able to hyphenate, making her name Caruso-Hinchey, she says. She says she didn’t want to give that name to her future children. “I didn’t want to burden her with a million names down the road,” says Caruso, who is working on a doctorate in health education.

She still vacillates about whether she made the right decision, especially since she’s had a daughter, Ophelia, age 3, who now has a different last name than she does.

“I had this moment when I brought my cat to the vet,” she says. The staff there called her tabby “Stripey Caruso” on the paperwork. “At least somebody got my last name,” she jokes.

By Beth Whitehouse

beth.whitehouse@newsday.comBethWhitehouse1

Beth Whitehouse writes about families, parenting and great things to do with the kids on Long Island. She’s been a Newsday editor and shared a 1997 Newsday staff Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the crash of TWA Flight 800.