This example actually describes me exactly. When we got married almost 12 years ago, my husband and I were still pretty young and I was scared senseless of the prospect of having made the wrong choice and only finding out many years down the road. Divorces were happening everywhere around us, and although we were intent on making our marriage work, my husband and I knew we would not have a chance if we did not learn to compromise. When it came time for some of the legal issues to be worked out and paperwork to be completed in regards to the marriage, I stopped short at the line that asked me about my name preferences. I loved my own name (since all 4 parts of my name ended in “a” and I had parts of names of both my grandmothers in there) and was very hesitant to change it. I think I would have in the end agreed to taking my husband’s last name, if he had not noticed my reluctance and convinced me that if it was that important to me, I should keep my last name and he would keep his. He would not want to take away a part of me that in a way defined who I was. We did have some options available: Me taking his last name, him taking mine, or me adopting a hyphenated version of my and his last name. Since I already have a double last name (not hyphenated), I decided against adding his name to mine, since I would have no longer been able to make my name fit into most lines provided on any type of form to be completed in the future. In the end I simply kept my own name, and to be honest, being able to retain some of the authority actually made me feel much more confident about tying the knot. It may sound strange, but I felt that if my future husband could accept such a tremendous aspect just because it was important to me (and did not stubbornly insist on me taking his last name out of pride of passing his name on to his bride and gaining dominance as the patriarch) then I was surely making the right decision at the time. It helped me ease into my new marriage and I was able to stay the person that I was, even if only from a psychological point of view. Of course a hyphenated version of both names combined would have been the optimal solution for both of us, had my own last name not been too long.

I think women should do whatever they want when they get married. It's their name, and that's a pretty personal thing. For women who have businesses, it might make sense to just keep her own name, so she doesn't need to change it on her business license, with all of her clients, and with all of her marketing materials.

I plan to hyphenate, but only because our names flow well together. If they didn't, I would probably make a different choice. I feel no obligation to give up my family name, however.

A guy at my office actually came up with a good solution with his wife. They decided to both change their last names to a name that is a hybrid of both names. It's not hyphenated, but is rather just the first part of his old name and the last part of her old name. I thought that was pretty clever.

I think it would be insulting not to take your husband's name when getting married. As if to say you don't want his name. I did take my husband's name.

A scenario that applys though: My husband's mother's line is dying in the sense they had lots of girls no boys and the name is disappearing. I could see her keeping her name or hyphenating it to continue her family name. My husband actually has a hyphenated name for this reason. I can say that it has caused him a great deal of identity grief as some of his legal stuff says just one name the others are hyphenated.

because the trouble its caused him if a wife just wanted to keep her name I'd recommend not going with the hyphen.