• 0 Posts
  • 8 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: July 1st, 2023
  • SybilVane@lemmy.catoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why do the majority of women still take their partner's last name?
    1·
    1 month ago

    Nothing too complex. I come from a culture where you take one last name from each parent. No hyphen. Just FirstName LastName1 LastName2.

    Some systems put LastName1 as my middle name and shortened it to one letter. Some excluded LastName2. Some squished both last names into one name, sometimes with a hyphen, sometimes not.

    But because every system did its own thing, no one could ever find me. I had 2 different credit scores at one point. I received 3 voting cards every election, all of them wrong, despite the fact that every election cycle I would take the hours it takes to report the errors and get them to “fix” it. I was enrolled twice in one class in grade 4 under two separate wrong names. And whatever name my high school used on their system, I wasn’t showing up when universities searched for my records, so I kept getting rejection letter after rejection letter with no explanation and it took me months to track down the cause and have it fixed, by which point it was too late to get into several schools. I also couldn’t buy certain things online because some stores’ paymentet methods wouldn’t let me put in the name of my credit card as it was written. Oh, and the government couldn’t get the name on my social insurance card and the name on my taxes to match. This affected my online logins, so I would need to call on the phone to verify myself for each tax-related transaction, including simple address changes.

  • SybilVane@lemmy.catoNo Stupid Questions@lemmy.world•Why do the majority of women still take their partner's last name?
    20·
    1 month ago

    I’m from a different culture than my husband and my last name was a bureaucratic nightmare. Almost didn’t make it into university because of computer mix ups, have had issues filing taxes, voting, getting a passport, settings basic IDs, getting insurance… It’s endless. Changed my name as soon as I could, and even THAT process was hindered by my original name.

    Bonuses: Distance myself from social media I had as a child. Harder for former stalkers to locate me if they decide to rekindle their previous obsessions. Don’t need to upset one set of grandparents when you name your children one parent’s last name and not the other. People stop asking me where I’m from and making racist assumptions about me. Everyone seems a lot friendlier now that they assume I’m [insert European white race here] instead of [insert non-white race here] and that’s despite the fact that I’m clearly white. Racism is wild. My signature is way shorter.

    Not saying this should be the norm, but I was happy it was a socially acceptable option for me.

  • SybilVane@lemmy.catoAsklemmy@lemmy.ml•What are some downsides to immortality that most don't think of?
    171·
    2 months ago

    Losing all of the skills you gain. No matter how good you get at something, after a few centuries you’ll have lost your edge. You can also only practice so many things concurrently without giving something up. At some point, years down the line, you might try to ride a bike again and completely fail to do it, or try to sing and fail to hit all the notes that came easily before, or do gymnastics but the muscles you need are underused. It doesn’t matter that you spent years mastering every skill, your abilities will degrade over time. You’ll never really be able to feel sure about your own abilities except for whatever you’ve done most recently.