The Surname Issue

Warning! This isn’t a blog post about traveling or moving to a new city. This is a wedding-related post and it is also an opinion piece: MY opinion #ShockHorror #DontJudge #NoPhotosInThisPost #YesIAmHashtagging.

Gordon and I consider ourselves to be a 21st couple. We lived together before we were engaged, we both work full-time as professionals in demanding fields and all household expenses are shared 50/50. Both of our opinions carry equal weighting and all decisions are made in consultation with each other (except the honeymoon location – that he needs to keep a surprise). But with some things I am traditional. He had to ask for my parents’ permission to marry me although I never told him this (good boy – he knew) and I want a traditional wedding with some tweaks because they look fun. I am also taking his surname. Yes, a self-proclaimed independent 21st century professional working woman is giving up her identity. What a load of c$%p.

I am not getting married for religious reasons – I was raised in a mixed religion household where I was whatever religion suited me at the time (simplified explanation: being Anglican got me into a very good private school and being Jewish gives me a German passport both of which got me to where I am today). I am getting married because I want to make a promise in front of every person who means something to me and I therefore respect that I will love Gordon for the rest of my life and I will be loyal to him and to us, no matter what. If God/Buddha/The Flying Spaghetti Monster bless us in the process then that’s great. The more who witness it the better. I am not getting into this marriage so that my father settles a debt with Gordon’s father or for us to breed a superior race of humans and therefore cure cancer. I am doing this because I love him and I’m going to spend the rest of my life with him as his partner. As a bonus, I get a new surname.

I will always be a Gans* and I will still be on the Gaggle of Geese whatsapp group that my immediate family has. For about a week I thought about getting a tiny tattoo somewhere of a goose but that means getting a tattoo which is something that I will never do. My legal surname will change but my email address will remain. Gordon has said a few times that he feels honoured that I would change my surname to his but for me it’s part of the Wedded Couple Package.

A friend of my parents’ kept her surname and she apparently found that it became awkward once their child was at school and people would ask why the child’s parents have different surnames – people assumed that they were divorced or never married. South African society is quite conservative about things like this – in NL people often don’t get married and it’s accepted by society as being as normal as being married. Our future as we currently see it is in SA but this is not the reason I’m taking his surname. Yes it means fewer discussions and raised eyebrows when we drop the kids off at school or birthday parties but that is an added bonus.

I know people who kept their surname for professional reasons but at age 27 I haven’t sat on the board of a Fortune 500 company so my name is not that important for my career – potential employers will still need to look at my CV to determine if I’m the right candidate and I haven’t worked at a company (until now) where if you ask for references and say “Louise who worked in Finance” the company doesn’t know who that is. My current employer is a huge global company but I’m here whilst changing my surname so my manager/HR will know me by both names.

My manager kept her surname when she married but she said changing it would have meant going from one long complicated name beginning with an S to another. And she said she was just too lazy to change it (I gather that it’s not an automatic thing in NL whereas in SA it is).

I could double-barrel the old and new surnames but someone once told me that double-barreled names meant there was a divorce in the family at some stage. I have subsequently learnt that this is not the case and in fact it indicates a marriage but I still can’t get the idea out of my head that I would be creating the perception that I was divorced. This is a good example of my stubbornness – I know my reasoning is wrong but I’m so set in my ways that I can’t overcome the thought.

So, then, why am I changing my surname from a 4-letter single syllable one to an 8-letter 3 syllable one with awkward capitals in the middle? I have 2 passports, a driver’s license (soon to have one for NL as well), an ID, 2 current bank accounts, 2 credit cards, a property plus all that goes with that and all of the usual bills and accounts that currently say Gans. It will be a nightmare to change all of these so why not just stay as I am? These are all just things. They do not define me. My current surname is simple and I enjoy the Dutch pronouncing it in Dutch – they will probably panic when they see the new one. To me, getting a new surname is one of the few traditional things that I’m doing in amongst the sea of New World things that I do every day.

I will miss Google automatically translating my NL internet banking name to LT Goose and Gordon’s silly laughter whenever he calls me Lieutenant Goose. I will no longer Google my name and see a New York Acting Chief Justice’s name but rather a freelance translator. I am looking forward to the day when someone calls me Louise Gans and I have to correct them. They will immediately know that I have married and I will quietly think to myself that I am still Louise Gans but I am also Louise McTavish. Mostly, I am still myself.

*Gans in German and Dutch (and some other languages) means Goose in English

Where has the time gone?

I had great plans for this blog, including keeping track of all the steps it took to get me and The Man here. Apparently that never happened. Oh well, I'll start again now that things are starting to settle down a bit. This will be another log entry but going forward they should be shorter and slowly I'll figure out how this blog will work.

Brief update on what has happened since my last post in August 2013:
1) We got engaged! Yay! (Some might say it's about time after 5.5 years). Brief synopsis: the first place we ever went on holiday to was Glengarry, in the Kamberg. We've been back a few times since then so it means a lot to us. Glengarry hosted a mountain biking weekend in September so we went with my parents. Sneaky Gordon had asked for their permission the previous weekend when I was visiting friends in Johannesburg (which included me moaning at one stage to one friend that it would be nice to go overseas as an engaged couple. Little did I know...). Friends who got engaged in July (also at Glengarry) had set their date for July 2014 so we decided that was a good time as well, as all our mutual friends who live overseas would be flying out to SA for their nuptuals. So in the space of 10 days we set a date - 19 July 2014 - and found a venue in amongst the panic of moving countries. All the other stuff is organised by remote control - the internet and email make it surprisingly easy to plan a wedding from the other side of the world. I spent a week in SA in February to do wedding planning that couldn't be done from NL.

My ring!

2) We lived in Ede for 4 months with N&C. They have a lovely home in a lovely little town in the Bible Belt. So not a lot happens there although the town square has a decent collection of bars and the town is on the edge of a huge forest/conservation area so there's a fair amount to do considering it's a small town whose shops all shut on Sundays. After 2 months of interviews and "whoring out" my CV to basically every large company in NL I started working in finance at an international FMCG - the tobacco industry which I've had to adjust to as I have never smoked and have never been a fan of smokers. It's amazing how perceptions change when smokers pay your salary...
At first the 1.5 hour commute was a struggle, especially as I started during the build-up to year-end followed by the audit in January so there were numerous late nights. I did quickly get used to it though and would read or watch series on my phone. In the end I enjoyed having a guaranteed 3 hours to myself everyday to think or zone out.

This is the forest near Ede

3) We moved to a 1-bedroom apartment in Amsterdam in February which has changed our lives dramatically. We both realised for the first time that we are alone in this adventure - N&C are 1.5 hours away so we can't just pop over for coffee or wine if we've had a bad day. The London thing makes sense now - this is a struggle to survive in foreign country, away from everything you are used to and if you have access to people you know or who know people you know then you have a support structure. After a few moping days in February, I resorted to the internet and discovered www.meetup.com. It's awesome. Apparently it started before Facebook in the USA and is a brilliant concept. You sign up to groups in your area which arrange events for like-minded people in your area. A'dam has a HUGE expat community - I read somewhere that 45% of A'dam residents were not born in NL - which means there are a lot of lonely people who are also looking for friends. So we've been to a comedy show where everybody (+-50 people) meets for drinks beforehand; we've been to a dinner (+-12 people); we've been to some drinks evenings at various bars around the city (30-100 people) and tomorrow I'm going to a ladies-only brunch (+-15 people). And slowly we are making friends. There are paintball events, running clubs (I'm currently investigating), travel groups and basically anything you can think of to keep you entertained and sociable. It's cliched but it needs to be said - you don't know what you have until it's gone; and in our instance we were the things that have gone away and left behind friends who have known us for over 2 decades in some instances, travelled through darkest Africa with, been chased out of Afrikaaner-extremist towns with, laughed until we've cried with or just cried with. Oh how the mighty have fallen! But we're getting back on the horse and have started to meet some really interesting people who also just want companionship and something to do on a Friday night.

Picture-perfect Amsterdam

4) Gordon managed to get his residency permit quite easily and quite quickly so he's been able to work since January. Not that there are many Architecture jobs available. There are (literally) thousands of firms in A'dam, Utrecht, Rotterdam and surrounds but they aren't growing even though the economy is no longer in a recession. He's consulting on a risk-work project for a firm but he will only get paid if the project comes to fruition. He's interviewed at some firms and basically we're just waiting. We can survive on my salary but only because we're paying very little for rent (it's a long story but basically we don't officially live in A'dam but still in Ede. This creates other hassles but saves about EUR400 a month). And to add to the stress, my company is restructuring this year so there is no guarantee that I'll have a job in December. I'm considering marketing positions (I can hear all my university accounting friends gasping in horror) because finance is almost completely being outsourced to Romania.

5) I successfully applied for the 30% ruling, which means that 30% of my salary is not taxed. This is a benefit for expats in NL who have scarce skills to compensate for the additional costs of living here. I wouldn't call accounting/finance a scarce skill but I won't question it! Besides the additional money I get each month, I can also convert my SA drivers licence to a Dutch one without doing tests. There are some other tax benefits as well.

Vondel Park, Amsterdam

6) Nikki was an absolute star with helping us settle in. Although there are so many foreigners here, it is still difficult to get settled in NL. Registering with the gemeente (municipality), immigration, bank accounts and pin cards, public transport systems, bicycle transport systems - it's a lot of complicated information in a foreign language so having a local who knows makes an enormous difference. People I've met through meetup have also said they couldn't have done it by themselves - agencies or local friends helped. She set up our appointment at the gemeente to register us; she came with to the IND (immigration) where we applied for G's permit and spoke in Dutch to the woman at the counter (who could speak English but some things are hard to understand in a second or third language); she phoned the bank when my card wasn't activated and 1000 other small things that we couldn't have done or even knew had to be done.

The famous I amsterdam sign

So, for now, we are content in A'dam.