I was willing to hyphenate my name if my husband was also will to hypenate. He wasn’t and he didn’t mind me keeping my name. Since we went off to Germany within a month it was much easier to keep it than to try to figure out how to get passports and credit cards changed without an address. We both have fairly short names that are constantly mispronounced or misspelled.
Miss Manners once suggested that kids have the mother’s name since they tend to deal more with the schools, the doctors and are more likely to have custody in the case of a divorce. We were in Germany when we had our oldest and I think it would have made their heads explode to have given the kids my last name. They had a hard enough time believing we were married with different last names.
Nearly everyone I knew my age or older kept their names, but for people younger than me it seems the majority have changed their names.