I gotta say, women losing their names when they get married is a pretty backwards practice. My wife is not my sister, nor my property, why should she take my name and lose her identity?
You should probably ask her. No one is forced to change their name, but some do.
The traditional practice as I learned it doesn't involve this. Instead, where boys are given three names at birth, girls are given two in the expectation that they will one day marry. Then, when Susan Floyd marries John Robert Sinclair, she becomes Susan Floyd Sinclair.
Compare Mary Ann Maxwell marrying William Henry Gates to become Mary Maxwell Gates.
There's that awkward moment where the announcer goes "Mr. and Mrs... Uh. <both their names>"
In fact, it’s worked well enough for us that if we were to have another child we’d consider giving him or her a different last name again instead of picking one of the three we already have.
(The only reason we sometimes wish she'd change her name is that hers is extremely common, and so she's constantly getting mixups with other people with the same name and has to sign things every time we buy a house or get a loan, etc. to say she isn't that other XXX YYY that has the bad credit rating or outstanding loan or criminal record, etc.)
What's weird is these are people with generally left-wing political views, and socially liberal on most things. But on women's issues, pretty backwards. It weirds me out.
The "problems" you describe are just...nonexistent, and really not a big deal. I have literally never encountered confusion about our marital status, problems with forms, or difficulty being introduced.
Islam does it, and there are no issues at all.
The very least when you have kids and their teachers or any official you encounter assume that the parents have the same name as the kids. (This can't be your kid!)
We know a couple where she had hyphenated surnames. Almost always confused the officials, colleagues and friends when they lived in Switzerland.
We decided against my wife not changing her name, since it was not worth the troubles.
The original post was talking about changing surnames in general so I thought that it was criticising the norm, and my reply was in similar fashion - "why does the norm exist?"
Should have clarified, sorry. It [not changing names] really wouldn't work out well if it wasn't the norm in place as you say, there are plenty of issues that could happen.
I'm currently engaged and plan on taking her last name after the wedding. Life would go on very large the same way if I didn't the same way it will if I do. The whole problem is overblown.
That's really interesting! Can you explain it a little more? I can't read Chinese, so it's a bit opaque what's going on...
For the example, I used the names of two historical people who did historically marry; I picked them based on Soong Mei-ling being mentioned in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_titles#Women , under the title I wanted to talk about.
For Chinese address in general, the example posits a woman named 宋美龄 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soong_Mei-ling ), whose family name is 宋 and whose personal name is 美龄, marrying a man named 蒋介石 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiang_Kai-shek ), whose family name is 蒋 and whose personal name is 介石.
Chinese titles appear after the noun being titled, not before. So the ordinary address for 宋美龄 (before or after she marries[1]) is 宋小姐 ("Ms. Song"), where 小姐 is the courtesy title for women, and the ordinary address for 蒋介石 is 蒋先生 ("Mr. Jiang"), with 先生 being the courtesy title for men.
The 夫人 ("Lady") title is unusual; it is applied to the name of the woman's husband, not to the name of the woman herself. (Compare an American letter addressed to e.g. "Mr. and Mrs. John Smith".) Thus, 蒋介石's wife can be referred to as 蒋夫人, regardless of what her name might be.
Wikipedia suggests that the title 太太 ("wife") is also applied to the husband's name.
[1] I'm following the convention of government forms here, in which 小姐 and 先生 are opposed options for how the form addresses you, and 女士 doesn't appear. The wikipedia section linked above states that 小姐 applies to unmarried women and 女士 applies to married women. My -- limited -- understanding is different; I see 女士 as being used to convey a higher degree of respect, such as in professional communications. For example, I was once advised by a Chinese person to address the mother of a child I was tutoring as 孟小姐; I can only assume that the use of 小姐 did not convey the fairly insulting impression that I believed she was unmarried.