I just found this boring rant on last-name changes that I don’t want to address because the subject has been discussed at length on this blog. I just want to draw your attention to the following statement that I find quite scary:
Not only is it a testament to honor and tradition that modern women are adopting husbands’ surnames, it is also a wink and a nod to the notion that a woman’s identity inevitably becomes entangled with her husband’s.
When your identity becomes “entangled” with that of your husband (child, parent, sibling, friend, etc.), it’s time to seek urgent psychological help. You are heading not only for a collapse of the relationship but for a host of psychological problems and abusive behaviors.
The idea that your identity can be entangled with that of another human being makes it impossible for love to exist between the two of you. If you need to see another human being as some sort of your own body part, this means that you are incapable of granting them the right to be a valid individual in their own right. As Ayn Rand said, “In order to say “I love you” you first need to be able to say “I”.”
This “entanglement of identities” is nothing but an illusion, of course. It’s an illusion born of disrespect for both oneself and the other. It is based on the idea that a human being cannot be whole without supplementing one’s identity with that of one’s perfect complement, one’s “media naranja”, one’s “other half.” Incomplete people don’t have the capacity to love. They experience a neurotic need to use other people to prop themselves up instead of developing personally, psychologically and intellectually until these feelings of incompleteness subside.
If you are incapable of seeing your spouse (child, parent, sibling, friend, etc.) as a separate human being with his or her own desires, preferences, wishes, needs, goals and dreams, you will inevitably start pushing them to service your wishes, needs and goals at the expense of their own. This is where the abusive behaviors begin to appear. A spouse can always counteract the abuse by heading directly to a divorce lawyer. But an “entangled” child will find it much harder to get rid of an invasive parent.
P.S. I ask everybody to avoid discussing last-name changes in this thread. If you have a burning need to discuss the subject, you can always take it to the relevant thread.
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