Ironically the one benefit I anticipated with changing my name is that H’s last name is 4 letters long and pronounced phonically. Easy peasy-not! I have spent 39 years correcting misspelling and mispronunciations of this easy last name ( which doesn’t go well with my first name either). I always had to spell and pronounce my maiden name but at least there was a reason for it.
I joke that I couldn’t marry my last boyfriend before DH because my name would have been a bad rhyme!
I only know a few women who didn’t change their last names when they got married. One it was because she owned a business and her maiden name was the in the name of the business. So, she kept her maiden name for professional reasons. The other was a co worker who married a guy with the last name Butz…I’ll let you mull that over!
H has a friend who has his mom’s last name…his father left when he was 2 and he changed his name because he didn’t want to be associated with his absent father. I’ve heard of plenty of situations like that.
I know plenty of women who were happy to change their names because their maiden name was really long, hard to pronounce, etc. My one friend was always getting so tired of people totally butchering her last name…
There was a family at the school I work at who had a Hungarian last name that was pronounced nothing like it was spelled. It looked like an easy name to pronounce, but no. Apparently it has accent marks…
I changed my last name when I married…just wanted to the change!
Ditto those who point out that a woman’s maiden name is usually her father’s. My parents were controlling and my father was physically abusive. I changed my name over thirty years ago and I’d do it again.
@mom2and the example you give of Jones - Smith family is easy. My last name is three syllables, often mispronounced and very Italian. My H’s is also 3 syllables. Our names together just sound really awkward.
What happens when Jones-Smith marries Rydzewski-Ehrlich?
S1 and DIL both considered hyphenating last names (as in Smith-Jones and Jones-Smith), as well as creating an amalgamation of the two. They ultimately each kept their own. One less thing to worry about when they divorced a few years later. 
I do think keeping their own names was for the best, as they both work for the same employer and there is enough institutional misogyny that DIL wanted to make darned sure she was viewed as a separate entity.
They did ask me what I thought about the naming issue, and I said that whatever they decided was perfectly fine with me. I was not inserting myself into that conversation!
I happily changed my name when I got married 28 years ago. It’s short and hardly anyone can pronounce it. It stumps most everyone. It’s an Asian last name, and since I’m white, people’s reactions are amusing when I introduce myself when my husband isn’t around.
Literally none of the women in our close or even sorta-close friendship group around our age (say, 55-65) changed her name when she got married. One college friend of mine experimented with it, without ever making a legal change, but the new name never stuck at work, and after a few years she simply stopped using it.
Neither our daughter nor our daughter-in-law changed her name when she got married. I don’t think any of our children’s friends who have gotten married so far have had the woman change her name, although I think one couple took on a brand-new last name. However, it seems like there is a cohort of women who are demographically similar to us and our children , but who are in their 40s - early 50s, a substantial majority of whom changed their names when they married. It’s something that’s clearly influenced by fashion.
I thought about changing my last name to my wife’s name, but I already had some significant professional brand-equity in my name, so I didn’t. To the tradespeople of the world, I am usually Mr. Herlastname. I answer to it fine. On occasion I say something like, “No, but I’m the next-best thing. I’m Ms. Herlastname’s husband.”
Our kids have her last name as a middle name. As far as I know, they never experienced distress because of the different last names. It was very common in their school classes growing up anyway. They were happy that we didn’t give them different last names, something that happened to a few sets of siblings they knew.
My last name starts with a very early alphabet letter and my husband’s with a very late letter. He REALLY minded being at the end/back of everything growing up, so our kids’ hyphenated name started with my name.
My BIL has a super easy last name, but one that more commonly is the same name with an “s” at the end. So they constantly have to correct people and documents. .
When my kids were little, some of their friends would call me Mrs. “my kid’s first name” like Mrs. “Sam” or Mrs. “Olivia”. I always loved that. 
Although I kept my maiden name, I’d answer to any - Ms. Maiden Name, Mrs. Husband’s Name or Mrs. “Sam”. Once the kids got their high school years, I told them to feel free to just call me by my first name.
I actually found that kids could adapt more easily than adults as they don’t carry as many preformed expectations about conventions.
I hyphenated my name 40 years ago & still regret doing so. The name just leads to confusion for others in the real world - e.g., the hyphen gets dropped by humans and computers which changes my name, doctor’s offices can’t find my records, etc. If I had to do it over, I would just have kept my maiden name.
DIL kept her maiden name. She was the last of her sisters to marry and they all changed their names. She also has female cousins with the same last name & assumed they’d change their names too. Keeping her name was a way to maintain her family name.
According to a friend of mine from Brazil - each person takes the name that came from their father and hyphenates that. So you might have a Jones-Ehrlich, for example. (But what could be cool is for the women to use their mother’s maiden names and the men to use their Dad’s bachelor names. 
If I had my druthers I’d have my mother’s maiden name, I really like it and it has an amusing story about its spelling which is probably apocryphal, but fun to tell people.
I took my husband’s name because we were becoming a family, and I wanted everyone in the family to have the same name. It could have been the other way around, but I am fine with following tradition. Also, why should I prefer my father’s last name to my husband’s? How was my maiden name “my” name? It was the name of my male ancestors, albeit (unnecessarily) shortened by my grandfather so as not to be obviously Jewish. If we had a matrilineal society and I bore the family name associated with my mitochondrial DNA, it wouldn’t be any more “my” name than would any other family name. I just want to wear the same identifier as the others in my nuclear group, especially my children.
Celebrating everyone’s choices! And the ability for (almost) everyone not to get judgmental about it. Isn’t feminism grand–that we can make our own decisions and not be judged for them?
For myself, I went with the everyone in the family has the same name route. H offered to switch to mine, and knowing he would, made it fine to choose his, which is more common.
I didn’t keep my maiden name as my middle name, because my middle name is my mom’s and many other folks in her family’s middle name. That connection is important to me. My D kept her name, but gave her daughter that same middle name, keeping that tradition up.
An odd anecdote. My grandfather was one of 7 kids who all went to a one room schoolhouse. The teacher was confused and gave half the siblings a similar sounding, but completely different last name on the books. Those names stuck until the end of their days. Half of his brothers/sisters did not have his name, nor the name of any parent. My grandfather also never knew his actual birthday. The birth certificate said one thing. The SS system and every other legal document said another. His mom thought the birth certificate was wrong, but wasn’t sure. Life was just different back in the 1920s.
I agreed with @MWolf on most points. My reason for changing my name was that when I got married, I felt that I had the choice between keeping the name of my father, who knocked my teeth out when I was 4, or taking the name of a man who loved me, never raised his hand or voice to me, and whom I chose.
@Massmomm I’m so sorry you had to deal with that. If I had your experiences, I would have changed my last name too.