My fiancee wants a double-barrelled name!

Dear Bunmi,
My fiancee and I are set to get marred in the New Year. She has told me she sees no reason why she should take my surname. I believe she should be proud to, but she says she doesn’t see any reason why she has to give up her “individuality.”

She has offered to hyphenate our surnames, but I think that’s just ridiculous. I’m a traditional man and I find her attitude irritating. If she’s not going to be proud to take my name, I’m not sure I want to go through with the wedding.
Muazu,
By e-mail

Dear Muazu,
Is there more to this relationship than a name change? You need to really sit with your fiancee and have a heart – to- heart about your expectations of marriage and of each other, before setting a wedding date. It looks as if there might be a major mismatch here that could course problems in future.

You described yourself as traditional (and I’m guessing also quite conservative) which usually means you have set ideas on how a wife should behave. Your fiancee wants to maintain her independence and may see marriage as more of an equal partnership than the conventional man-is-boss model. This is not a good sign for future happiness when you’re not prepared to compromise by hyphenating your surnames. It is, after all, a meeting in the middle solution. You’ve got a lifetime of decisions to make together which are far more important. All should be made as joint decisions with each of you prepared to meet in the middle.

Who’ll want me with two kids?

Dear Bunmi,
I got married in my early twenties during my Youth Service and have two children under four. My husband was a chronic womanizer who was constantly sleeping with our children’s nanny! Things got so bad that my friends accused him of constantly groping them. In the end, I kicked him out as the flat we lived in is my dad’s.

Now that I’m free, guys in my age group are either still having fun or have recently settled to married life. So who on earth is going to be interested in me with two infants? I love to meet a dependable man but I know there are very few men out there who would take on someone else’s kids when single girls are there for the taking.
Gloria,
by e-mail

Dear Gloria,
The way things are with you, it may look as if you’re out on a limb, but you’re not. There are lots of other women with kids, and many of them will be single like you. And that means there are lots of men of your age who are also single, with children of their own from a previous relationship. They’ll be totally at ease going out with a woman who also has children. They’ll love the fact that they get to have a sort of second chance-because often after a divorce, men don’t have regular access to their own kids.

So don’t panic. You may seem like the odd one out, but there are loads of men who will want you-and your children.