I was engaged for 477 days. I was a bride for one day. I’ve been married for seven days.
I’ve been Holly Coletta for 11,021 days.*
I got married last week, to my best friend, my equal, my partner. We exchanged funny (hers) and sweet (his) vows and did shots of Wild Turkey (his) and Patron (hers) to unify our love forevermore, or something, I don’t know, “sand ceremony” didn’t really seem like our thing.
Anyway, we’re married! It’s official. It’s on paper. It is documented. We’re partners. We’re equals. We’re wed! We’re Ryan Franz and Holly Coletta, husband and wife.
I’m Holly Coletta, wife.
I know it’s shocking, in these modern times when we’re still idolizing the corset century or whenever “Bridgerton” is based, where women are just ladies in waiting—waiting for men to swoop in and give them new names and nice things. (I’ve never watched “Bridgerton” but this feels accurate.)
But it’s true, keeping your name is a thing women do! It’s a choice we’re allowed to make! What!
I’ve only had half a cup of cold brew, so I’m trying to keep my raging feminist in check, but I do feel like before I rant, I should acknowledge: ladies, I get it. I get it if you wanted to take your husband’s name. I get that it’s a thing people like to do, people look forward to doing, and god Ariana Grande knows society certainly gets it, damn, enormous sigh. This isn’t meant to shame anyone who took their husband’s name because it’s “what people do” or because it was a family expectation or because Jesus said you had to** or because, shit, you wanted to!
I didn’t want to.
When I was little, I did the thing—I would doodle my first name and my crush’s last name to see how it would look all over the back of my notebooks. Growing up, I understood it like all little girls understood it. You had a last name when you were a kid, and then one day when you were pretty and worthy, a man would marry you and you would toss the name that had been your entire identity up until now into the flaming trash and you would take his name instead, to signify to everyone that you were his propert—er, partner. Also if you didn’t do this before age, like, 23, you were going to die alone.
Made perfect sense to me, I just had to figure out how to meet Erik von Detten from “Brink!”
As I started to see myself as a “writer” (age 9, when I won my first award from grown-ups for a story I wrote about a boy who meets a genie named Zenon (just hire me, Disney (Marvel sector)), I started to have a new appreciation for my name. Holly Coletta, famous author. No, wait, Holly N. Coletta, a classy little New York Times bestselling bitch. I fantasized (still do) about the cover pages, about the About the Author, about how badass Holly N. Coletta is gonna look up that spine.
As I got older, I became partial to the idea of hyphenating last names, once I realized that was a thing some women—crazy feminazi types—did. I fucking LOVE hyphens. I hyphened the shit out of my adjectives so much in high school that my English teacher threatened to start dinging me for it. (And I was not about to become a below-98-percent-on-anything type of person.) So it only made sense to me, a goal-oriented, career-minded, gonna-do-things-my-way-or-no-way woman, that once I found my dude, he’d put a ring on it and I’d put a hyphen in it.
Plus, at some point, I had just started liking my last name.
I had long been a “two namer,” although it wasn’t like there were any other Hollys in the group. (I’ve known a few Hollys my age, and only mildly liked one of them. So, obviously, this Sagittarius sun/Capricorn moon wasn’t letting any other Hollys into this group.) My friends called me “Holly Coletta.” Used in a sentence like: “Holly Coletta, where is your coat?” when I would strut around Athens, Ohio in mid-January with only a faux leather jacket from Forever 21 and 22 lemon drop shots I bought for all my friends keeping me warm. Teachers called me “Coletta,” mostly male ones who think you should talk to everyone like they are on a sports team, I guess, but still. My college advisor once told me to never change my name because Holly Coletta was so solid and recognizable, and because I am a sucker for a good compliment from a person in a position of authority, I was like, “Totally.”
Hyphens seemed the way to go, and it also seemed less offensive to the man, back when I gave a shit about offending The Men.
Then I met Ryan Franz. Drinks, drinks, drinks, shots, years, years, cats, shots, cats later and I still always thought I’d probably hyphenate when we eventually got married. (And I knew early on we were eventually getting married, lmao.) Franz wasn’t a lame last name, first of all. Second of all, “Coletta Franz” sounds like a boss bitch, or an expensive Italian red wine. It’s got an “etta” and a z at the end. It’s not like … Smith-Wilson or some shit. It felt worthy of a hyphen, for sure.
And then … we got engaged.
I was honestly surprised by how much the idea of actually changing my name, not just doodling it on paper or trying it out in different sans serif fonts on my resume, affected me.
The more I looked into it, and read about it, especially Jia Tolentino’s essay on millennial marriage and love “I Thee Dread” — the more I felt unsure. I felt sad. I felt like I was losing a part of myself, even though I was doing this whole marriage thing solely because I had found someone who saw me as a partner, who valued me as his equal in every way (except he knows more about cars and I know more about the MCU). I felt like, suddenly, changing my name—MY name—meant I had to change my entire identity, while he only had to change, like, what? His car insurance? What the fuck?
I realized Holly Coletta wouldn’t exist anymore. The Holly N. Coletta at the bottom of all those stories I wrote when I was 5, 11, 14, 17, 18. The Holly Coletta on my college application that got me into journalism school. The holly coletta on top of my resume**** that got me a lot of internships and a pretty solid copywriter career started. The Holly N. Coletta of my future novels. She’d be gone forever. She’d be dead, even if I kept her hyphenated.
And I realized, with a pit in my stomach that felt a little like defiance and a lot like determination, that I couldn’t change my name.
Not change. Lose. I didn’t want to lose Holly Coletta.
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When you ask women why they kept their name, I feel like you get the same handful of canned, acceptable responses.
For their career. I’m not going to pretend like I am some kind of famous writer in Columbus, Fucking Ohio because lol, but career does play a part in it for me. The network here is small, and the name, like my college advisor once told me before he helped me get an interview with Entertainment Weekly, is recognizable. Beyond that, though, are my future plans. I’m Holly N. Coletta, and my books are going to live on shelves in Barnes & Noble right where they belong: between Meg Cabot and Michael Crichton.****
They want to carry on the “family name.” I don’t come from a family of traditions. My dad is Italian a few generations back, his grandparents immigrated to Detroit in the early 1900s. They must have left all the “nonnas” and the biscotti recipes in Italy, though, because we turned out about as Italian as Pizza Hut. We’ve got skin that tans easily and thick, unruly hair and possibly ties to the Italian mob a few grandparents back and that’s it!*****
There’s also a weird kind of family name reclaiming trend for Boomers and Gen X, where you unofficially hyphenate or add maiden names to your Facebook. I guess so all your friends from high school can find you? People have friends from high school? Who still actually choose to use Facebook? Yikes. You could do that, or you could just keep your name! It’s a thing women are empowered to do! Kind of crazy, but did you know they can also own cars and homes and live entire lives on their own?
All that to say, I didn’t want to keep “Coletta” out of some kind of legacy. I wanted to keep it because I am a Coletta, would always be a Coletta. Although, my dad did have three girls, so we are for all intents and purposes—the Last Colettas.
They have a relative or friend who has done this before. I’m the first woman in my family, that I know of, to keep my name. My father was, for lack of better word, shocked. Not unsupportive, not angry, just shocked. I didn’t tell him until we were hiding in the kitchen at the wedding venue 5 minutes before he was going to hand me off to my new husband (that’s another thing: society has made this ACTUAL APPROPRIATE AND VALID CHOICE so awkward to announce, so shrouded in “will I offend someone” that it’s stupid. No one should feel “weird” about a completely rational decision they made for themselves? Blerg!) so I get that it was news. He kept saying, “Okay, hmm, okay, yeah” in a tone I can only describe as “It appears I have raised strong-headed women.” He was like, “Ryan’s okay with that?” Which I will allow, because this is my dad and he thought I’d be a Franz and I’m the eldest and I’m not usually the one who breaks the mold. And I was like, “Yep!” And he was like, “Gotcha. Hmm, okay, but on paper, you’ll be Franz…” and I was like, “On paper… we’ll be married.” And he was like, “Okay, Holly Nicole, interesting, okay.” Which is Dadspeak for “I do not understand this millennial feminist nonsense, but she seems happy.”
And, I don’t know, it kind of made me sad that it was such a “???” but the whole thing with breaking patterns is someone has to start it and maybe now, it’ll be a little less, “Huh” for my future daughters or nieces or daughters in law when/if they decide to keep their name, or hyphenate it or toss it out altogether. They’ll get to decide.
I’m the second in my close friend group to get married. My best friend (like, since I was 11) eloped this past October and kept her name. To me, it was a total no-brainer. She has one of the most unique names I’ve ever known, and even beyond aesthetics, she should be able to make the choice to keep it JUST BECAUSE how many times can I say it? Anyway. Her husband is Austrian, so he’s got a solid last name too, as far as coolness is concerned, but they were both very “shrug” about it when they visited. Like, duh! We are married! We have different names but we are one unit! No problem! And I was like, “Yeah yeah YEAH!”
Another of my best friends from college is getting married this fall, to another one of my good friends from college (I loved college). If she took her fiance’s last name she’d be in alliterative territory, but we’ve both talked before about taking our boyfriends’ names or hyphenating or just tacking it on at the end, et al. She’s decided to keep hers, too, because the J-School scene in Athens is a breeding ground for bad bitches, and also because IT IS HER CHOICE. Her fiance’s mom kept her maiden name, so there’s some precedence there for any angry Olds.
A few of my work wives have done the marriage, thing, too. I work with someone who kept her last name, full stop, and I didn’t realize her partner was her husband right away, but then she referenced him as her husband and I wasn’t like, “WELL HOW WOULD I HAVE EVER KNOWN YOU WERE MARRIED?” and instead was like, “Okay ma’am I see you, a queen among us.” Another did the ol’ tack it on after she had a baby, because the hospital got weird about who the baby belonged to and the different names on their wristbands and honestly that sounds like an absolute nightmare and completely unnecessary stress to put a NEW MOM under, fuck the system.
And actually, my work wives were the ONLY people, other than my very close friends, to even ask me what I was planning to do with my name. Like, they acknowledged that I had this big choice to make, as a working woman and also just a woman. Keyword: choice. Whoa.
I’ve also worked with women who’ve hyphenated, who have brothers-in-law who took their family name (MEN ARE FEMINISTS, TOO), or who dropped their middle name, made their maiden name their middle name and added their husband’s name and again—that sounds like so much work? Jesus.
My work wives were supportive of my decision to keep the name I had had since I was literally 2 seconds old, as were my friends obviously, but an unexpected source of empowerment came from my nail tech. She’s got a badass last name that I hadn’t realized was her maiden name. When I did that thing during our gel mani appointments where I babble on about my life and told her I’d decided to keep my name, she was pumped. She’s got a kid who understands, a husband who understands, and, suspiciously, has never seemed to have to overcome this series of treacherous hurdles that we are told befalls independently minded women who decide to test the limits of human existence by not bowing to a societal expectation established back when women were literal property > humans.
She was like, “You were born with a full name. You came into this world complete.” And I was just, like, whoa. Like, WHOA.
She was RIGHT. She didn’t even need me to give an excuse — “because career” “because my dad only had girls” “because I don’t want to go to the BMV.” She was literally just like, “You are a person who is marrying another person and you love each other that’s amazing.” I shouldn’t have to give an “excuse” for a decision I’m making for myself. This is allowed! (This is also like a 1,000-word excuse essentially I know I’m working on it okay!)
I wasn’t some puzzle piece looking for my other piece to feel whole. I was a full cat princess puzzle looking for another cat-adjacent puzzle (I won’t say prince because this post is all about not succumbing to gender norms, if you are only scanning) so that we could sit on a coffee table next to each other and both be complete!
You know what you hear a lot less, for why women kept their name?
Because they just fucking wanted to.
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I love Ryan. I love his family. I love that his family has always made me feel loved. But by “me,” I mean Holly Coletta. Not Holly Franz. Not Holly Coletta Franz. Not even Holly Coletta-Franz.
Holly Coletta.
I was super nervous to tell him about how my feminist ideals and core of my being didn’t want to take his last name like a good little wife. Ryan is by no means a conservative guy, but I have always felt like he’s held some more traditional ideas about love and family than me. Probably because I’ve been trying to girlboss since I was like 8 and it can come across a bit like a speeding train ready to run you over. But he’s always been open-minded. He has always listened to me. He has listened to me talk about why Hillary Clinton would have been important, why Kamala Harris is important. Why it’s upsetting when men think they can have any type of say over a woman’s body. Why it’s upsetting when men try to hold your wrists down on the futon at your friend’s party but you told them to stop, and why it’s upsetting that something like that and things way worse have happened to all your female friends. Why it’s upsetting when men come up to you in the mall when you’re alone, to compliment your eyes, or yell at you about your “hot body” from the window of their Trump truck in the grocery store parking lot, knowing full well they wouldn’t fucking dare if your fiancé had been there. Why it sucks to be told over and over again not to cry at work. Insert plenty of other feminist rants here. He’s always listened, and he’s always supported me. I knew he wouldn’t be mad that I didn’t want to be Holly Franz or Holly Coletta-Franz, but I hoped it wouldn’t make him sad.
But, because I found one of maybe four good dudes left on this planet, sorry ladies, he was totally fine with this? Like totally fine that his future wife didn’t want to become his titled property because it was the year 2020 and girls we are getting the shit done???
At first, he was like, “Not even hyphen?” And I had to be like, “Not even hyphen.” But I explained that it was more than my love for hyphens, it was still just feeling like … not me. It wouldn’t be me anymore. Not to mention the paperwork, in a global fucking pandemic, and all the women on the Internet were saying change or don’t change but don’t dare hyphenate because—surprise!—the systems in society aren’t set up to accept long-ass hyphenated names so you’ll always get cut off. Wow! Imagine that, a woman being cut off.
ANYWAY.
He also expressed concerns that by sharing the same name it was OBVIOUS to people we were married, and so when we had different last names, people might not know. This is what I mean by “traditional.” But what I mean by “listening,” is that I countered that people would know we were married because 1) I was going to put it all over the social medias 2) we were going to wear rings forever 3) we would still introduce ourselves as my husband, Ryan and my wife, Holly and 4) the people who we wanted to know we were married would know we were married. They would know.
And he was like, “Okay!”
But more importantly, he was like, “You can do whatever you want to do.”
Whatever you want to do.
Dear reader, that’s why I married this man a week ago.
Ryan would never force me to do something I didn’t want to do. And because of that, I compromised, and I told him that while I didn’t want to change my name right now, I wasn’t 1000% opposed to never changing it. Maybe the inevitable endless stream of Christmas cards addressed to “The Franz Family” would wear me down. Maybe some paperwork somewhere would annoy the shit out of me just enough. Maybe I’d get tired of giving a school administrator the bitch face when they realized my last name didn’t match my kid’s. Maybe one day I would be Holly Coletta-Franz. Maybe.
A part of me thinks it’s a bummer that I felt like I even needed to write this, this defense of why I wanted to still be ME even after I got married. I’m bummed that every card we got last weekend said “Mr. and Mrs. Franz” on it. I’m bummed that no one thought to ask if I was taking my husband’s name, I’m bummed that it’s just assumed I would. I’m bummed, but I’m not mad. I’m very grateful for all the love we’ve been shown, and I know the name thing comes from a place of excitement and a place of genuine joy. I’m just bummed that it also comes from a place of normalcy. I get that the “norm” seems to be that I am Mrs. Franz now. But I’m not, because that’s my mother-in-law.
I’m bummed because this decision that I know I am entitled to make, because I am my own human with my own brain, was seen as “other,” or as “different” and probably always will be.
I can’t promise that I won’t feel a little twinge of disappointment when the miswritten cards or invites come. It’ll be tiny, and it might go unacknowledged, but it’ll be there.
I can’t promise that I won’t feel a little angsty when another woman looks at me juuuust differently enough. Kind of like, “Oh, okay, a need-no-man type.” I don’t love my man any less because I didn’t want to use his name at the cost of losing mine. I love him just as he loves me: as a partner, as an equal, as a soulmate.
I can’t promise I won’t get a little rant-y after a couple glasses of champagne at our wedding reception, or in the post I write about how weddings are a whole other gender norm monster in and of themselves.
I can’t promise that, but I can promise to be me.
I am a feminist. I am a cat lady. I am a writer. I am Ryan’s wife. I am Iron Man.
JK—I’m Holly Coletta.
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*SOS I just did so much math for this post?
**I don’t know if that’s how it works, just basing it off of my biased experience with judge-y, pushy Christians who made you feel like you already had a reservation for one in Hell when you didn’t want to get dunked in water during a strange long “spiritual” weekend in a shitty convention center in Cincinnati when you were 13.
***I learned cursive in third grade because that was something they used to teach 9-year olds (?) in the olden times. Anyway, the capital cursive H? UGLY AS FUCK. As fuck! I was like, looking at my friends with names that started with S and E and M—even Ks were more aesthetically appealing, excuse me? I immediately rebelled and tried to start titling my papers with lowercase h lowercase c and my teacher was like, “Absolutely not,” so I had to wait until I was a full-grown 18-years old in college to do what I fucking wanted.
****To be fair, Franz would put me pretty close to Fitzgerald, so, again, not a huge bummer.
*****One sister’s 23 & Me revealed a whole lot of White European up in these genes, and another sister’s foray into Ancestry dot com said we are the great-great-great-great-grandnieces of a semi-famous dude named Karl Marx from my mom’s side but hey—this is about last names.
hi, i’m holly. 