No Stupid Questions

This isn’t a thing in India unless there is a ‘value’ in the surname.

I have a coworker whose maiden name is Dykes. She was very happy to change.

After we were married wife kept her last name, partially for professional reasons partially because she didn't like my last name :-) When we had kids we decided that the kids would have my last name to avoid hyphen hell and her last name is super generic so any time she has to search for an account at the bank or anything like that she almost always has someone else with the same first and last name it can be a pain to find the correct "her"

Makes things easier for both parties when medical issues arise, even more so for parents. And I genuinely believe that a lot of women don't know it's an option.

I actually didn't change my name when my mom married my dad, so you can really just say "no." i was in middle school when I decided that, but whenever my dad tried to do anything, he had to jump through hoops. 🤷🏿‍♀️

Having the same last name is just an easy way to show togetherness and unity. My wife kept her last name because she earned her MD with it but she's fine going by Mrs. (my last name) in a parental setting.

For me, it was because my husbands last name was simpler than my maiden name.

I'm a fan of the hyphen strategy. I really don't wanna change my last name just cause I fell in love. But hyphenation sounds like a good compromise.

Especially in the digital age, lots of people have digital usernames like SarahSmith1727373. So the last name clearly doesn't mean much anymore....

but you also just used 2 names in your example... others here already said the right stuff, but I reiterate, it's a lot of symbolism helping create feelings of unity in a family unit, but also there are legal issues/benefits for changing a last name.

My wife took my last name because she had her father’s last name. He abandoned her shortly after birth and never attempted to get in touch with her. He quit jobs to avoid paying support. She did it to remove that last vestige of him from her life. Had she had her mother’s last name we would have hyphenated our names together.

I didn't change my name. My perspective is that my identity doesn't change just because I got married. My name has been mine since birth and it'll remain that way.

I am originally from Spain but have since moved abroad where partners changing names is common.

Personally I love the way it is handled in Spain, where you get your family name at birth and won't be changed by marrying (you could change it but it is not normal to do it when you get married). And the family name is always a combination of both parents. Traditionally it was the first family name from the father and the first from the mother, but nowadays it can be decided which goes first. So officially everyone's got two family names, one from each parent. Unofficially you can just go as far as you want, so you get your given name, then first family name from one parent, then first from the other, then the second from the first, then the second from the second, etc. So if you track your family tree you can take all family names to make a huge list of them, which is not used for anything but somehow makes you be more attached to all those roots without names being lost.

Of course that makes it a nightmare when going to other places, everyone thinks your first family name is a middle name and dealing with two family names officially can be a pain. And let's not go into naming your kids then...

When I was marrying my wife she asked me how I felt about her changing her name to mine and if I wanted her to do that. She got her father's name but her mother divorced him later on and changed her name back and my wife's father was not much part of her life, so she was happy to just change it. I told her that for me that custom is a bit strange and I didn't need her to do it but would accept it if she wanted to (knowing her background), so whatever she did I wanted it to be her choice, but notice how in Spain people who share family name are siblings, as it is extremely rare for two persons to share both first and second name if not related, so sharing family name with my wife is really odd in a way...

At the end she changed her name, but because in this country you only have one she only took the first one. While our kids had to take either both of mine or hers (we had our first kid before us marrying and her changing name, so we chose mine), so now we all share the first (and only, in the case of my wife) family name but me and my kids have both my first and second family name (any kids after the first kid must get the same name).

If that was not complex enough, as I got my kids both nationalities, in Spain the rule is always first of one parent plus first of the other parent, and as the first one was born before us marrying, in Spain he has a different family name than he does where we live.

When I get married, I'm thinking hyphenated, with her using her last name first, and vice versa. But last names can be pretty large. Idk how to tackle that.