#3 Learning His Last Name

Probably one of the few things you remember from learning Shakespeare in eleventh grade is "What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet!" So what is in a name? (And why are we naming roses?)

Single girls LOVE learning his last name. Whether we meet him at a bar, at a barbecue, at the gym, or at the supermarket, we are SO thrilled when we can discover his last name. To us, it's like winning a prize.

How do we do this, you ask? Sometimes he makes it easy for us when all his old football buddies call him by his last name. (I guess it's some macho guy thing or something.) Sometimes we use our bionic ears to overhear him close out his tab at the bar (single girls like when he keeps an open tab, by the way). Sometimes he just literally hands it to us in the form of a business card when we meet him at a networking event. And other times, we resort to a little creativity. (Like having our cousin at the FBI run his license plate number. Just kidding! Sorta.)

So why is learning his last name so important to us?

First of all, programing "Holden (firefighter from San Francisco)" looks stupid in our phone. (And possibly slutty. Just because single girls aren't having sex with only one person doesn't mean we're slutty.) Plus, I went through a period in my life where every other dude I met was named Brian/Bryan, John/Jonathan/Jon or Michael/Mike. At some point, I couldn't remember which Mike I was trying to avoid, which Brian I had hooked up with or which Jon I had hooked up with and was trying to avoid.

Do you see how confusing it can get for us when single girls don't name our "roses" properly?

Secondly, learning his last name potentially opens up an entire gold mine of information about him, thanks to the magic of the internet. Mostly Google. And social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn. (In fact, single girls like Google stalking so much, it's going to be its own post!) Single girls like information. Knowledge is power.

Finally, single girls like learning his last name because we are already imagining ourselves potentially getting married to him. This may sound silly, but dudes don't have to worry about changing their last names. Now, some of us single girls have already made up our minds about keeping our own last names; but for those of us who are unsure, we want to know what our names may sound like after we exchange vows and fill out a thousand forms to legally change our names to his.

Remember "Marcy Darcy" from Married With Children? Or "Corky Sherwood Forest" from Murphy Brown? Or "Julia Guglia" from The Wedding Singer? We want to avoid that.

So what's in a name, Juliet? Well, a lot. I suppose you didn't know any better being only 14 and all. But did you really have to get all emo on us and die so tragically? Tsk, teenagers those days.