I GOT married in March, and having lived with my partner for four years, I wasn’t expecting very much to change.

Except my name, that is. And that’s actually quite a big change to make.
In the lead-up to the wedding, I never had any doubts about getting married. I had been with my husband-to-be for 11 years, so I’d had plenty of time to figure out we are right for each other.
My only doubt came over changing my name. And it made me realise that women having to give up their maiden name represents just one of the subtle but deep-rooted inequalities still present today between men and women.

I’m not a raging feminist, so I didn’t make a big song and dance about the injustice of it all.

And it was my decision to change my name. But it was more because it’s seen as the right thing to do, and because there wasn’t really another option that seemed viable.

I would never ask my husband to take my name, and double-barrelled feels pretentious to me.

I wanted to get married to become a proper family, and sharing the same surname, to me, is part of that.

But it’s only since marrying that I’ve really understood quite how big that change is.

I still can’t get used to being Emily Brown, rather than Roberts, particularly as I decided to keep my maiden name for work purposes – partly because I didn’t want to give it up entirely.

But also because I have been Emily Roberts for 30 years, and now, all of a sudden, I’m expected to be known as Emily Brown.

And I feel like a fraud whenever I use it. It’s like when I used to play games as a child with my friends, and we would adopt a ‘cool’ name.

Sooner or later, one of your friends would forget, and call you by your actual name.

It’s exactly the same when you marry – my friends, family, and even my husband keep forgetting that I’m a Brown.

My mum pointed out to me once that most women will be in their 50s before they have used their married name longer than their maiden name.

And what about those women who go through divorce, or get married for a second time, having to change their identity all over again?

For men, there’s no such inconvenience.

Every day as part of my job, I have to ask women whether they are a Mrs/Miss/Ms. It automatically identifies a woman’s marital status. With men, no one will ever know unless they directly ask.

But having decided to change my name, I will need to embrace it soon, or constantly feel like a fraud.

Maybe it’s the first of many compromises that marriage asks of you.