Don't do it

“I’m 26 and my girlfriend is 28 and we’ve been dating for a little over seven months. We both want the same things in life — marriage, kids, close ties to family on both sides, prosperous careers and a house in the ‘burbs. Things have been terrific, the best relationship either of us has been in, we love each other very much and recently moved in together. The thing is, my girlfriend has made it clear that if we marry, she feels like she would be losing a part of herself if she took my last name. It’s very important to me that a family unit share the same last name, though. I’m not a hard line traditionalist and certainly not a macho, domineering type — but I feel like something would be missing, or like I would not be totally and completely loved if my wife rejected that part of me. Likewise, hyphenated names do not sit well with me. We’ve discussed this and I’ve made it clear I will not marry or start a family with someone who will not accept my last name (which, by the way, isn’t something odd or off-putting like, say, “Latrine”). I did not deliver this to her as an ultimatum, rather, as part of a well-mannered conversation in which I also made it clear I would stay with her forever without marriage. I worry, though, that this difference has set an expiration date for our relationship. Am I being unreasonable? — Name Withheld”

You’re not a hard-line traditionalist or a domineering macho type? Good! Then you shouldn’t have a problem with taking your wife’s name if you feel so strong in your convictions that a family unit should share the same surname. Maybe your girlfriend would even be open to creating a new last name you both take when you marry. Still feel like it’s the woman’s job to take the man’s name and you’re not going to marry any woman who disagrees? Well, maybe that traditionalist macho label fits a little more snugly then you’d like to admit.

Does that mean your relationship has an expiration date? Pretty much! If you both want kids and you’re refusing to have them with a woman who won’t take your name, obviously this isn’t a relationship that will last much longer. Maybe it’s time for you to open your mind a little and ask yourself why a name-change is the only way you can feel “totally and completely” loved by a woman. If you aren’t willing to change your name, does that mean you don’t totally and completely love your girlfriend, hmm?

When the web started, I used to get really grumpy with people because they put my poems up. They put my stories up. They put my stuff up on the web. I had this belief, which was completely erroneous, that if people put your stuff up on the web and you didn’t tell them to take it down, you would lose your copyright, which actually, is simply not true.

And I also got very grumpy because I felt like they were pirating my stuff, that it was bad. And then I started to notice that two things seemed much more significant. One of which was… places where I was being pirated, particularly Russia where people were translating my stuff into Russian and spreading around into the world, I was selling more and more books. People were discovering me through being pirated. Then they were going out and buying the real books, and when a new book would come out in Russia, it would sell more and more copies. I thought this was fascinating, and I tried a few experiments. Some of them are quite hard, you know, persuading my publisher for example to take one of my books and put it out for free. We took “American Gods,” a book that was still selling and selling very well, and for a month they put it up completely free on their website. You could read it and you could download it. What happened was sales of my books, through independent bookstores, because that’s all we were measuring it through, went up the following month three hundred percent

I started to realize that actually, you’re not losing books. You’re not losing sales by having stuff out there. When I give a big talk now on these kinds of subjects and people say, “Well, what about the sales that I’m losing through having stuff copied, through having stuff floating out there?” I started asking audiences to just raise their hands for one question. Which is, I’d say, “Okay, do you have a favorite author?” They’d say, “Yes.” and I’d say, “Good. What I want is for everybody who discovered their favorite author by being lent a book, put up your hands.” And then, “Anybody who discovered your favorite author by walking into a bookstore and buying a book raise your hands.” And it’s probably about five, ten percent of the people who actually discovered an author who’s their favorite author, who is the person who they buy everything of. They buy the hardbacks and they treasure the fact that they got this author. Very few of them bought the book. They were lent it. They were given it. They did not pay for it, and that’s how they found their favorite author. And I thought, “You know, that’s really all this is. It’s people lending books. And you can’t look on that as a loss of sale. It’s not a lost sale, nobody who would have bought your book is not buying it because they can find it for free.”

What you’re actually doing is advertising. You’re reaching more people, you’re raising awareness. Understanding that gave me a whole new idea of the shape of copyright and of what the web was doing. Because the biggest thing the web is doing is allowing people to hear things. Allowing people to read things. Allowing people to see things that they would never have otherwise seen. And I think, basically, that’s an incredibly good thing.