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My friends Dave and Libby on their wedding day. Aren’t they painfully good-looking?!

Tell us a bit about yourself! 

My name is Dave Holden (née Hendricks) and I’m originally from the Northern Minnesota Iron Range and grew up in the northwest suburbs of Minneapolis.

I’ve lived in the city proper for the last five years and spend my free time running around the lakes, crafting unnecessarily elaborate goofs with friends, and injuring myself on a bike year-round. I am 38, but with the impulsiveness and risk assessment of a much younger and dumber person.

What’s your wife like? 

She is the most wonderful person I’d ever met. She is warm and kind and instantly makes anyone she meets feel like the most important person in the room. If you have a “How stunningly gorgeous my partner is…” series, I could fill several entries. She points out every dog to me and packs band aids and granola bars everywhere we go because I am almost always hungry and always always clumsy.

We met through a group of kickball friends in a manner that she loves to tell and that horrifies and embarrasses me to this day. She and her roommate were hosting a barbecue and I tagged along with some friends.

The communal punch was generously spiked yet delicious and our initial meeting involved me crashing through her kitchen and inadvertently rearranging every fixture in the bathroom. I escaped with my dignity nowhere to be seen.

Later, I delivered a basket of flowers with a Target gift card attached to cover the damages and an I.O.U. guaranteeing “One free haymaker to my embarrassed jaw in the unlikely event you can ever find it in public again, because I am mortified.”

Later on, we had whiskey floats on a park bench where we tried to one up each other with dating disaster stories, not knowing that our previous encounter would be one some day. Shortly thereafter, I held her hand at a Gopher game and haven’t let go since.

Growing up, how did you think about marriage, family, etc? 

My parents divorced when I was nine and there was a lot of fighting and the occasional violence. It gave me less of a blueprint for marriage and more of a model of what to definitely avoid.

My mother kept her married name, so I just assumed that the maiden name was something discarded during the wedding ceremony and never got back, sort of like a snakeskin. Did I mention I was nine?

When did you guys start talking about The Last Name Situation? 

It was something we had thrown about after the engagement, but didn’t really discuss seriously until the marriage license was in front of us. Anyone that has planned a wedding knows how deadlines can sneak up on you and our license was due very soon.

I threw out the idea of taking Holden as a last name and there wasn’t a downside to it that we could think of. The only hurdle left was asking her father.

What made you decide to change your last to Libby’s – rather than hyphenating, creating a totally new last name, etc?

We did briefly discuss creating a new name! The combination of Holden and Hendricks affords us two options: Hendren, which I didn’t like at all, and Holdicks, which we disagreed on strongly not because of the phallic, yet hilarious nature of it, but the number of D’s in it.

I insist that it is one D and my wife thinks it is two. Two D’s is for words like Haddock and would make the joke way too on the nose. Though one D does not make it subtle, I could still keep a straight face with Dave Holdicks on a business card.

But ultimately, we wanted to make sure the right name would be passed on to our children. The name Holden is on scholarships and non-profit boards. Hendricks doesn’t open any doors for our kids and might actually close some in the wrong circles. The wrong circles being a certain American Legion bar in northern Minnesota.

How did your families react when you told them about your decision?