Commentary
Women, Want to Radically Increase the Chances Your Marriage Will Last? Take Your Husband's Last Name: Study
As someone who has been happily married for nearly 20 years now, I sometimes get asked, “What’s your secret?”
While my actual answer is, “Never go to bed mad at your spouse,” turns out there may be another “secret” to maintaining a long and fruitful marriage.
According to a fascinating 2026 analysis from the Institute for Family Studies, it turns out that a wife taking her husband’s last name could actually be a factor.
This is how the Institute for Family Studies puts it, caveats and all: “The overall finding from these two surveys is simple: spouses who don’t share a surname divorce at about a 50% higher rate than those who do share a surname, and their divorces come about 30% earlier in their marriages.”
“These huge effects reflect very large selection biases, since who chooses to share a surname in a marriage is not remotely random, and so we can’t say these effects are entirely or even mostly causal. Nonetheless, there are some reasons to believe surname sharing might have some modest causal effects on which couples stay together,” the study added.
Now, before...