Why don't more men take their wife's surname when they marry?

> In medieval England, men who married women from wealthier, more prestigious families would sometimes take their wife’s last name, says Stephanie Coontz, a professor of marriage and family history at Evergreen State College. From the 12th to the 15th century, Coontz told me, in many “highly hierarchical societies” in England and France, “class outweighed gender.”

It's not that I am particularly high-born; in fact, I think her family would count as much more high-status than mine. But her family name is very ordinary, and my surname sounds royal and is spelled in a very old-style aristocratic way. I strongly believe this has given me opportunities I would not otherwise have gotten, and it's something we both think it'd be foolish to give up.

The only time it’s even a minor inconvenience is picking up mail in the odd chance that the post office won’t leave it in our small apartment mailbox so one of us has to pick it up from the post office.

All the software in the world is setup for different surnames due to long term, live in boyfriend/girlfriend situations, as well as wives who want to concatenate their new name with the old. Marriage has been condensed to a checkbox on every important form and I’m glad it’s that way.

We’ve decided that our children will take my name and my wife will likely change hers then to make it easier for them to remember while growing up, but until then, we’re in no hurry.

You last name is your fathers (or rarely, your mothers) name plus a 'son' or 'dottir' at the end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_name

I find this extraordinary. I've never really thought about it much, I've just known I've always wanted to get rid of "Smith" since I have a common first name as well. I wish there was a freely accessible copy of that study.

When we were engaged, I learned that she wasn’t planning on taking my last name, and the thought didn’t really bother me —- I felt it was her choice to do as she wished in that regard, and it wouldn’t change the fact that we were married.

As it turned out, she already had a number of years of experience as a lawyer with her existing name, and there would have been a reputational cost to the change, so she just wanted to keep her name. Makes total sense to me!

Since then, I’ve been called “Mr. Geyer” more than a few times, and I’m kind of used to it by now —- maybe about as much as women get called Mrs. Husband-name, when they didn’t actually change theirs.

Household-wise, we are the “Geyer-Knowles Family”, by dint of alphabetical sorting. We don’t have children, but if we did, then they might have a hyphenated last name.

Now, I do have a male friend who changed his last name to match that of his wife after they got married, and the story I heard was that he never liked his last name. So that totally made sense.

The messy case that this article doesn't mention is what to do about your last name on divorce. There's less tradition there, and sometimes children get upset at the idea of their parents' names no longer matching theirs.

Please note I’m not advocating for Portuguese or Spanish naming customs per se. I’d like to hear what other HN readers think about this particular option.

i didn't even had to think about it since i have western name, my wife has Chinese, so either combination would look extremely strange at least for us (for mixed children i find it acceptable to see western given name with Chinese foreign name, but for someone not mixed it's odd)

Isn't there real journalism that theatlantic can do rather than silly nonsense like this. I expect this from reddit's ELI5 rather than a supposedly respectable magazine. Also is every other headline from theatlantic going to be a question?