Editing Maiden and married names (section)

=== Spain ===
Spouses have always kept their original surnames. Following [[Spanish naming customs]], a person's name consists of a [[given name]] (simple or composite) followed by two family names (surnames), the father's and the mother's. Any children whom a couple have together take both first-surnames, so if "José Gómez Hevia" and "María Reyes García" had a child named "Andrés", the resulting name would be "Andrés Gómez Reyes".

Law 11/1981 in [[Spain]], enacted in 1981, declared among other things that children, on turning 18, now had a legal option to choose whether their father's or mother's surname came first. If a family did not exercise an option to change the order of the names in their surname, the law defaulted to the father's surname as the first.<ref name=":14">{{Cite book|last=Zubiaur|first=Leire Imaz|chapter=La superación de la incapacidad de gestionar el propio patrimonio por parte de la mujer casada|chapter-url=https://dialnet.unirioja.es/servlet/articulo?codigo=2874645|title=Mujeres y Derecho, Pasado y Presente: I Congreso multidisciplinar de Centro-Sección de Bizkaia de la Facultad de Derecho |year=2008 |isbn=978-84-9860-157-2 |publisher=Universidad del País Vasco/Euskal Herriko Unibertsitatea|pages=69–82}}</ref>

Also in Spain, a 1995 reform in the law allows the parents to choose whether the father's or the mother's surname goes first, although this order must be the same for all their children. For instance, the name of the son of the couple in the example above could be "Andrés Gómez Reyes" or "Andrés Reyes Gómez".<ref>[http://noticias.juridicas.com/index.php?doc=http%3A//noticias.juridicas.com/base_datos/Privado/lrc.html ''Art. 55 Ley de Registro Civil'' – Civil Register Law] (article in Spanish)</ref>

In some Spanish-American countries it is customary for women to unofficially add the husband's first surname after her own, for social purposes such as invitation letters or event announcements. The couple above may introduce themselves as José Gómez Hevia and María Reyes de Gómez. It is also common to name, in formal settings, the wife of a man as "señora de", followed by her husband's first surname.