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Hyphenated

My name is Lori Hylan-Cho. I answer to Lori Hylan, because that's who I've always been, and even to Mrs. Cho, if I'm checking into a hotel under a reservation my husband has made, but my legal name is Lori Hylan-Cho. It's the name that's listed on my driver's license, my passport, and my Social Security card. It's the name I invented for myself a few hours after my wedding, when I decided that I wanted to both remain a Hylan and become a Cho.

I used to think hyphenating was kinda silly, until I was faced with a name-change decision myself. Up until the wedding day, I was planning to stay Lori Hylan. There really is something special and spiritual and life-changing about getting married, however, and after going through the whole experience, I found I really wanted to be Hylan-Cho, not just Hylan (and not just Cho).

Of course, I did not invent hyphenated names: They've been in vogue for YEARS. This is why I find it so appalling that so many databases, web forms, and humans can't handle them.

All my airline tickets read LORI HYLANCHO. So do most of the hotel reservations I make over the web. (One attempt to foil the space-and-hyphen-eating Last Name field resulted in a reservation for Lorihylan Cho.) This is mostly just annoying, but it's often inconvenient as well. The new self-check-in terminals that airlines practically force you to use don't recognize the name on my credit card, LORI HYLAN-CHO, as being the same as the one they have in their reservation system, LORI HYLANCHO, so I have to know (and type in) my ticket number in order to get a boarding pass.

Most web forms merely butcher my name after I click Submit, but I recently ran into a form validation script that wouldn't accept my legal name. It was on the TiVo website, where I'd gone to order a replacement remote (our TiVo arrived with the car, but the remote went into storage). The weirdest thing about it is that it accepted Hylan-Cho as a valid last name for shipping, but it declared it INVALID for billing. The name that's *actually on my credit card* was invalid for billing!

As galling as some of the computer rejections and modifications have been, the human butcherings are usually worse. As we traveled on our honeymoon road trip, I'd call ahead to hotels to make reservations, giving my newly-minted name each time: "H, Y, L, A, N, hyphen, C, H, O". Upon arrival, I'd find that I'd been registered as Lori Hylan/Cho, Lori Hylan'Jo (my favorite), or Lori Hylan,Cho. I had no idea that so few people knew what a hyphen was.

The latest and most maddening misnomer, however, came with the loan documents for our new house: I'd been renamed by our mortgage broker to Lori H. Cho. MY NAME IS NOT LORI H. CHO. My middle initial is M, and always will be. Some women, when they marry, take their husbands' names and use their maiden names as their middle names. I think it's a great solution for some people, especially when the woman wants to preserve her name, but when one or both names are too long for hyphenation. It's also great for people who want to avoid the hyphenation horrors I've encountered and still use both names. But for me, the hypenation was intentional and desirable.

As I crossed out H. Cho, wrote in Hylan-Cho, and signed Lori Hylan-Cho on line after line and page after page of the loan documents, I got more and more angry. Lori H. Cho DOESN'T EXIST. I'm not sure why I reacted more strongly to this butchering than to others (which have included Laurie Hyland and Lon Highland along with the aforementioned Lori Hylancho and Lori Hylan'Jo). Perhaps because this wasn't just a ridiculous—and temporary—hotel reservation ("allo, is this missus 'jo?"), but a legal contract. If it isn't fixed, my name will be wrong on the deed to the house.

It also seems like a slap in the face, a sign of disrespect with a hint of sexism. I gave a lot of thought to what my name would be after I was married, and took pains to change it on all my legal documents. Either my maiden name or my married name was on EVERY SINGLE SUPPORTING DOCUMENT we gave the mortgage broker; not ONCE was it listed anywhere as Lori H. Cho. So why would he assume that Lori H. Cho was my name? Had he really never encountered a hyphenated name before? Did he really think that I couldn't bind my husband's name to my own, that I had to assume my husband's name alone and relegate mine to a middle-initial memory? Was the person who typed up the forms just lazy?

I don't know. All I know is I'm not Lori H. Cho.