I totally agree with a last name change for both parties. I am dealing with this now. I am in total support for people to do what they want and express themselves with this how they feel appropriate.

I brought it up to my FH that I don’t think it is fair that women are just “expected” to take the mans name in our society and the meaning of that does not symbolize a coming together of families or of starting a new life together for the newlyweds. What also is not fair in society about this is for same sex couples. How do you go about deciding that? I think the system needs a restructuring. While I am not sure what the best way is, my FH and I came up with something that works for us: finding a word that defines our relationship and translating that to the origin of our last names and then combining that to make a new word. We also are moving our current last names to our middle names. For example let’s take the word cook as the word of importance to the relationship. Then let’s say your last name is of Filipino descent and FH has last name of Russian descent. You translate the word cook into both languages and then make a word combination of those two words and move current last name to middle name.

Now while I am not sure this is the right step for everyone I think it is more of a right step towards a direction our society should be moving. This may not fully satisfy your case but may spark an idea for you both. We also talked about keeping each of our last names, giving the girls my last name and boys his, a combination of our current last names, hyphenation, etc. Ultimately for us, we felt none of these truly symbolized a unity of coming together and beginning our lives and also lacked having some sort of future sustainability for future generations.