It never even crossed my mind to change my name - it was quite simply a
non-issue.
It's my name, for chrissakes. It's what I've always been to myself, never mind anyone else. What possible rationale can be made to support my becoming someone completely different because I've gone through a 15 minute legal ceremony?
As for it being easier to call oneself by one's husband's name - yeah, well, it's easier to stay home, cook, and let someone else worry about the big decisions, too. Easy was never what being a woman was about, ladies.
My judgement (and I will admit to being judgemental) of women taking their husband's names doesn't come from a feminist point of view, necessarily - it's more that it's one of those baseless, brainless, airheaded things women do without thinking twice that give the rest of us a bad name (not to mention stop the authorities having to update the system to deal with modern families).
Why are you getting married? Is it because you love each other, and want to live forever? You can do that without getting married.
Not if one of you is from Israel and the other one from the UK. Or if one of you is from the US and the other one is from Indonesia. Governments don't smile at you avuncularly and say "oh, you're in love, that's so sweet, here, have a visa".
I'd rather be fighting the system while living on the same landmass as my SO, thankyouverymuch. Had I fallen in love with someone with the same passport as myself, marriage would never have been an issue, because it is an antiquated meaningless ritual (well, it is to me, and I can make a case for it being that to any non-religious person). But that's not how things happened in my life, so I'm sticking to as many of my principles as is practical.
I have been prompted to include my position on the naming of children in the absence of a "family" name. It's a pretty pragmatic one:
It is the unfotunate truth that up to and in some countries even over 50% of marriages end in divorce.
It is equally true (and I am not expressing any view on the correctness or otherwise of this state of affairs) that in 90% of divorces custody is awarded to the mother.
In these circumstances, if the mother had kept her own name after marriage or taken back her maiden name after the divorce, she and her children will not share a name. This is not in itself the end of the wrold, but administrative glitches and a certain identity snag for the children are more than likely to present problems. I therefore think that in couples where the women have kept their own names, and in fact in most couples these days, the best course of action would be to name the children after the mother or to give them hyphenated names. The latter has always been the norm in Spain, Portugal and parts of Italy, and is not as outlandish or unworkeable as might first appear.