2 Newlyweds Combine Their Last Names to Make a New One
A newly married couple in British Columbia is making beautiful music together in the form of a surname mash-up.
Kristine Gick and her husband, Jason Wagner, are bucking matrimonial tradition when it comes to their monikers. Instead of the bride adopting the groom’s last name or a hyphenated last name — or, like an increasing number of married women, keeping her birth name — the couple have decided to create a whole new name by combining their last names, according to CBC News. They’ll soon be signing their holiday cards as the Wickners. That’s right: Gick + Wagner = Wickner.
Their reasoning? “We couldn’t just take the other person’s and move on like that,” Jason told the publication. “That wasn’t a discussion we really even had. We just realized that wasn’t going to happen.” Kristine added that by going this route, the couple would be experiencing the concept of losing personal identity and “wiping the slate clean” together. Their decision may seem odd, but at least these two are on the same page — a very positive dynamic, considering they’re now wed. Also, Jason doesn’t care who thinks their name combo is strange. “When it went on Facebook, people would comment,” Jason told CBC News. “[But] I don’t even know you, so it doesn’t matter what you think.” The couple claim that people in their personal lives were accepting of the choice, even if strangers aren’t necessarily.
Jason and Kristine had a few different options, of course, when coming up with their new last name — among them, the unfortunate Gagner and, even worse, Wack — but decided on Wickner because it sounded “the most like a real name,” the article states. Also, the pair had its unborn offspring in mind when creating the surname. “We’re trying to do a service to our possible future children, not a disservice,” Kristine told CBC News with a laugh.
As many newly married women (and some men) know, changing your last name legally is no easy undertaking; it requires a decent amount of work. But forgoing both spouses’ names for a brand-new one is an even hairier undertaking, according to CBC News. “In addition to forms filed with [British Columbia’s] Vital Statistics Agency, a name change also requires fingerprinting by the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police]. For other things, like driver’s licenses and passports, the issuing agencies each have different procedures that must be completed to reflect the change,” the article says. In other words, you should really want this, but it’s kind of a pain to see it through. But if leveling the playing field when it comes to the family name is important enough, no mountain of paperwork will be high enough to stop you.
The paperwork is still processing for Kristine and Jason to become the Wickners, and when it’s complete, they’ll each be issued a new birth certificate. In fact, according to Kristine, the change feels tantamount to being reborn, according to CBC News. It also means she’ll no longer have to deal with people mispronouncing her current name, Gick, which actually uses a soft G.
While the Wickners’ stunt is a strange, it’s not unprecedented. Last year, Bustle rounded up a bunch of married couples who mashed up their last names. Among them were Cora Stubbs-Dame and Suriya Jeyapalan, who came together in holy matrimony to become the Jeyadames. There was also Geoff Werner-Allen and Suzanna Chapman, who are now the Challens.
Sarah Greeson thought that hyphenating her name with her husband’s, Marbach, would be “a mouthful” for their children, so the couple opted for the not-much-simpler Greesonbach. Alice Kirby and Larry Charny, on the other hand, made things simpler — and creatively so — by scrambling the letters in their last names to come up with Dark. They told ABC News, “We think about language and words and we kind of free associated … Charny means black or dark in Russian, and at the time there were no others in the phone book.”
Even a celebrity got in on the act. Alex Vega, an actress who appeared in Spy Kids, and her husband, Carlos Pena, linked their names to become the PenaVegas when they married in 2014.
CBC News got in touch with a spokesperson for the Vital Statistics Agency to ask how common the name-mash-up phenomenon is, and while it “isn’t unheard of,” the agency “doesn’t track specific cases, so it’s hard to know exactly how common it is.” Hey, if it works, it works.
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