I have just reread a previous post here about my name. It says it's a tell all post and then isn't.
Some random anecdotes about what a nuisance my name has been and why I do the things I do which didn't make it into that piece.
Corporate Policy
I had a corporate job for five years (plus three months of training). At the time, I was generally going by my middle name of Michele and, of course, corporate policy defaulted to using your first name for your email address and the name attached to your cubicle.
So I jumped through hoops to have the name on my cubicle changed to Michele and just lived with the email address they gave me. THEN I made a lateral move to a different team and my new boss was ALSO named Michele with one L and her boss was some other variant spelling of Michelle.
So I said "I'm not going to play this game." And went back to using my first name at work.
Socially
The previous post tells the tale of switching to Michele both online and off for two reasons:
1. Although it's a variant spelling, Michele is much more common than Doreen and I hoped to blend in better.
2. I hoped to avoid a man I had reason would be looking for me because I'm a mega conflict avoider which has often served me well.
Part of what was driving my desire to use a more common name was that I was going to urban planning type meetings open to the public and interacting somewhat frequently with people who spoke Spanish as a first language who would add a schwa sound to the end of my name and call me Dorina instead of Doreen.
In multiple languages, including German and Spanish, Doreen sounds extremely harsh and unfeminine. I have German relatives because my mother was a German immigrant, so I was often called Dorina in early childhood, thus I never corrected anyone who called me Dorina and was not offended.
Inevitably, they would realize they were "mispronouncing" it and this would lead to a THIRTY minute discussion about my name and that I'm not offended and blah blah blah. So I wanted to use a name that didn't derail professional interactions with long tangents about ME and personal information about ME.
People often accuse me of being a narcissist and making everything about ME though I actually go out of my way to try to avoid that and can't for the life of me figure out how.
Anyway, I also frequently did not correct people in online forums who misspelled Michele as having two Ls or would only bring it up jokingly to try to be informative without making a big deal of it.
But whichever name I went by, it seemed to lead to long discussions about ME and my name that I didn't want to have AT ALL while some people accused me of being a narcissist who made everything about me.
Issue number two stopped being a concern when the man in question called me out of the blue one day five years after the relationship ended. Because he couldn't readily find me on his own, he had HIRED a private eye to find me.
Conclusions: My concerns that he might try to contact me again were not "crazy." Also, it didn't apparently work to put up polite barriers to being found by him.
As nicely as I could, I roughly told him "I'm dying of something gruesome the doctors can't ID and it's probably a parasitic infection. So rest assured, I'm not anyone you want to sleep with. Also: I got over you ages ago. How about you get over me already?"
So that conversation freed me up to go ahead and go by my very unusual full name publicly because if men want to obsess about me or create drama etc, not going by my name isn't a means to protect myself, sadly.
The Dirty Truth
I've told bits and pieces of this in online comments, so it's not actually a secret but it would be tough for most people to find this information.
The polite cover story that people probably assume and have never asked is that I kept my married name when I divorced in order to keep the same name as my children. Which isn't actually untrue.
But the dirty truth is I kept my married name primarily because I was raped by a relative with the same last name as me and my divorce was amicable, so my ex husband's last name is less offensive to me than my maiden name.
Which is part of why I would likely change my last name if I ever remarried: In one last attempt to wash it all the hell off at long last.
And I imagine I'm not the only woman who defaults to changing their name upon marriage for reasons of that sort instead of going all FEMINIST on people and keeping their maiden name. So maybe don't dig too deep into it. Women have options and don't necessarily WANT to answer your questions about their choices.
The Big Picture
I know I talked about this SOMEWHERE once online in comments on some forum, but didn't include it in my previous post. Practical reality is that trying like hell to find some "gender equality" solution for the name game is a ridiculous nightmare.
If everyone regardless of gender starts hyphenating their last name because MAWWIAGE, it doesn't take too many generations before everyone has some stupidly long name.
I wish people would get the hell over the name game as feminist grandstanding on largely irrelevant details and look for more practical answers to real problems like "How does a woman navigate this issue of keeping professional continuity when she may marry and may change her name?"
Because changing or not changing your name doesn't necessarily let you escape this garbage anymore than going by my more common middle name let me escape what feels like some kind of minor curse surrounding name issues. Married women who keep their maiden name routinely get called "Mrs. (His last name)" ANYWAY, especially when meeting new people in circumstances where he's better known and they know her primarily is his wife.
Guess what? In most cases, the husband will have a more prominent career than her and be better known. Even very successful women can marry up, see for example multimillionaire Janet Jackson who was married for a time to a billionaire.
In cases where she's a big name and he's not, I have heard that such men somewhat often get called "Mr. (Her last name)."
So the societal assumption there is she changed her name to his upon marriage though she may not have.
The Internet
Sort of a sub issue of the social stuff but not exactly: When I first got online a zillion years ago, the Internet was a smaller space socially. There weren't a lot of Michelles of any spelling that I was running into.
It has grown and at some point I concluded that having a common name online was actually a problem. It's hard to get that name as a handle if you join a forum because it's probably already taken and when you speak, people can't keep it straight and confuse you for other people.
So I began contemplating reverting to my first name online long before it happened and the corporate incident above is part of what got me thinking about that.
Random
To this day, when traveling I sometimes use Michele if I have to, say, order food and they verbally ask for a name for the order because they will probably spell it wrong but pronounce it correctly and saying Doreen pretty much guarantees they can't spell it or pronounce it and I will either get called something else entirely or have some stupidly long conversation about spelling and pronouncing my name.
I used to have a list of examples, but the only one I currently remember is being called Gloria because I was so baffled as to how they got that from Doreen. I eventually concluded that all the names had "oree" in the middle as their common denominator.