What title are you going to use if you're not changing your surname?

I can't decide what to do either - so thanks for asking and I look forward to the responses

I think if I wasn't known by my title and surname at work then I'd definitely just use Ms on anything that required a title, but it just seems to lead to a whole discussion and explanation if I introduce myself as Ms in person. The whole point of Ms is that it doesn't specify your marital status (because why is that relevant to anyone?) so it sort of defeats the object if every time I introduce myself to someone new, i have to get into some big explanation of why I don't use Miss or Mrs!

You could use Ms but just accept that when the kids say it, it'll probably come out sounding like 'Miss'.

I agree with you about Mrs, if I kept my own name, it wouldn't feel right using Mrs (that sounds like I'm my mum).

You could just stick with Miss but if you don't want to do that, I think the only option really is to switch to Ms.

Actually at school, because I teach French, a lot of the kids call me Madame + surname, so I guess I can just encourage that! It's handy that in French, any adult woman is "Madame" regardless of marital status. No equivalent of Ms, but it's not needed. I wish we just had a single title for women in the UK instead of having to faff about with Miss/Ms/Mrs!

I'm going to be using Ms, although I currently use Ms so not much of a change for me!

I suppose kids need to learn sometime how to pronounce it, could you make a cute little intro lesson out of it? I'm assuming it's young kiddies, so could you find things that rhyme to try and get them to learn the pronunciation? I personally say Ms to rhyme with the black country pronunciation of Bus.

Alternatively you could be Mrs + husband name for the kids? I'm going to be Ms Myname most of the time, but at my husbands work funtions I'll be Mrs Husbandname.

Nope, it's big kids! In my experience they call everyone Miss regardless of marital status because they can't really be bothered remembering who is Miss and who is Mrs, which I'm fully in favour of as there's no reason it should matter to them which of their female teachers are married or not, but the introduction of Ms seems to completely confuse them. I guess in the area I teach, there's not a lot of use of Ms. I'm actually moving to a new location at the end of this school year so we'll see how the kids there cope with Ms!

I had a conversation with my partner about this yesterday and he was like "oh my god, it's a minefield for women, isn't it?!". He would prefer me not to change my surname because he disagrees on principle with someone taking on the other person's identity and losing their own name when they're married, but I don't think it'd occurred to him that there might be an issue with titles to consider! I wish we just had one gender neutral title that everyone used in situations where using first names is too informal...

I believe you can use the gender neutral Mx, but I have even less idea on how to pronounce that then Ms!

My Oh and his family did seem to be expecting my to change mine, but they seem to have accepted that I won't be. I did try and get my OH to change his surname to mine, but no dice. In fact that's how I got him to accept my decision! He complained that changing his name would be difficult as he'd have to change his documentation, it'd cause problems in his field of work, etc.. Halfway through complaining (and me staring incredulously at him) the penny dropped, and he said 'Ooooh this is why you don't want to do it'

I do think with big kids it'd be easier to make a point that marital status doesn't define a womans identity, so they should use Ms unless they know for sure they use/prefer Miss/Mrs!

Mx is pronounced a bit like "mix" as far as I know - I have a couple of friends who use it, but nobody actually ever calls them by title + surname so pronunciation isn't really an issue!