Example, Mr. and Mrs. John Smith
I hate this for the obvious reasons but it’s especially annoying to me because my wife didn’t take my surname!
Example, Mr. and Mrs. John Smith
I hate this for the obvious reasons but it’s especially annoying to me because my wife didn’t take my surname!
You think that’s annoying? My wife and I aren’t even married.
I mean we call each other husband and wife but we don’t believe is shackling ourselves to one another, even for tax purposes, and we find the ease of permanent separation keeps our relationship fresh, and has for 35 years.
We used to get mail addressed to our house as Mr. and Mrs. <my name> or <her name> and we quickly realized why: it’s just advertisers collecting my name or her name, gender and the fact that we’re married (not legally but we say we are). Absent the name of the spouse, they assume a man would bear his own name and a woman the name of her husband.
Obviously it can’t be anything other than fucking advertisers since we’re not legally married: city or state agencies wanting to send us mail know exactly what both our names and marital status are and use them correctly.
The easy solution is to not provide real data to data brokers whenever possible. We now use fake names, and we also track which names we provide to whom because it’s interesting to see how they bounce back at us.
For example, is she uses the name Elizabeth Corona-Smith to, say, book an appointment at the hairdresser, and I get mail addressed to Mr. Corona-Smith with advertisement inside for arthritis products, I know the online service her hairdresser uses to book appointments sold her data, and the hairdresser filled in her approximate age to add to the data they sold.
With that knowledge, next next time she goes to town, she can give an earful to the hairdresser and tell them she’ll never patronize them ever again.
It’s happened several times. It’s really interesting to see how your information gets sold when you use fake information.
Wouldn’t you be common-law after 35 years?
Probably, in the US the laws vary by state though
Fair enough, my Canadian bias snuck in there.
We make sure it’s very difficult to prove, especially wrt cohabitation.
Seems strange to me, but you do you!
Even if there is no one, they assume you’re married.
I remember having one sent to me in high school. It was weird. It’s just name scrappers getting every name they can.
I’ve had this a lot. I’m almost 40, live alone, and never married, but I often get stuff addressed to “Mr and Mrs solarmonkey”… as a bonus, since my dad’s generation there have been zero new men with that last name (only girls from my dad and his brothers).
I love getting junk mail addressed to my mortgage co-signer, though. He has never lived here. Sometimes they address me with his last name, which is pretty funny (it’s my step-dad, and my mom died years ago, so we really don’t have much of a relationship at this point, and definitely don’t share a last name).
I like throwing that stuff directly in the recycling. If you don’t even know who I am that makes my job really easy.