That's what we did - combined the letters of our two last names. And we weren't even hyphen-boy and hyphen-girl.
My wife and I married in 1996. At the time, we lived in the Bay Area, so when discussing how to solve the problem of potentially commingling names, we'd seen it all: couples who'd each kept their surnames-of-origin, couples who'd gone the traditional route of woman-takes-man's-surname, couples who'd hyphenated. None of it really sat right with us. I don't want to offend anyone who's chosen any of the aforementioned options, here, this was just our thought process at the time.
Keeping our own individual last names offered the greatest convenience. All your old high-school friends would still be able to find you on the then-not-yet-existent Facebook, and nobody would have to go through the hassle of a legal name change. The downside (for us) was that it just seemed very sterile: why even bother getting married if you're not going to share a name?
The traditional route of woman-takes-man's-name probably rubbed both of us the wrong way more than any of the other options, perhaps not surprisingly. I grew up on the west coast, first in San Diego, moving to the Bay Area to attend Berkeley (and staying because I liked it), and my wife was a Georgia girl who got tired of the cultural climate in her home state, voluntarily packed up everything she owned into a convertible Mustang and drove across the country to San Francisco to start a new life. So "traditional" has never described either of us, and when it came to choosing a married surname, neither of us was all that keen to simply have her take my last name.
By the time we got married, we'd both been exposed to plenty of hyphenated couples, or even just people we knew who already had hyphenated last names because their parents chose that route. It always seemed like a bit of a load to carry around, especially for kids: "hi, I'm Jessica Rabinowitz-Chakraborty." Plus, believe it or not, we really did think about the exact issue you raise here: what happens to the next generation - and the one after that, and the next one - if most couples adopt the hyphenation solution? By the third or fourth generation, you've got kids with eight or sixteen last names? At some point, it just becomes untenable.
Which brought us to the solution you alluded to here: take a portion of each of our last names-of-origin, and create a new name. We were both a little bit apprehensive at first, but it quickly became apparent to us that we were onto something. After all, the entire point of hyphenating last names is because a couple wants to perhaps reject the culturally assumed patristic nomenclature of women abandoning their families of origin when they take a married name, and/or the hyphenating couple simply wants to honor BOTH families of origin (something of which we approve!).
But it struck me one day that if I were to discover a never-before-known comet, or a new element for the periodic table, or a new species deep in the rainforest or something, one of the things that comes along with creating (or discovering) something truly original like that is the undisputed right to NAME one's discovery. Why should marriage be any different? You're intentionally choosing to create a new family, a combination that has never existed before -- so why shouldn't IT have a new name, too? One that still respects and refers to the families from which it comes, but which is unmistakably its own entity, not just a tediously long laundry list of prior families?
So we did.
Because this is the Internet and all, I won't go into detail about which names were the original ones, and how we got to our current married name, but it was exactly what you suggest: a mixture of our previous last names. And we've never regretted it. Our children - like all children - will never know themselves as anything other than this last name (though of course we've told them how we did this), and we are a unique family entity.
I will say that we were lucky in that both of our surnames-of-origin were from the same general part of the world, making the combination relatively easy. We had friends in the Bay Area who wanted to do something similar, but their nationalities were just so different that any resulting combination would have been an unpronouncable mouthful. So I recognize it might be tougher for, say, a Pakistani man and a German woman than it was for my wife and I. Nevertheless, I don't regret our decision at all.
Just thought your readers might like to hear a real life example.
My wife and I married in 1996. At the time, we lived in the Bay Area, so when discussing how to solve the problem of potentially commingling names, we'd seen it all: couples who'd each kept their surnames-of-origin, couples who'd gone the traditional route of woman-takes-man's-surname, couples who'd hyphenated. None of it really sat right with us. I don't want to offend anyone who's chosen any of the aforementioned options, here, this was just our thought process at the time.
Keeping our own individual last names offered the greatest convenience. All your old high-school friends would still be able to find you on the then-not-yet-existent Facebook, and nobody would have to go through the hassle of a legal name change. The downside (for us) was that it just seemed very sterile: why even bother getting married if you're not going to share a name?
The traditional route of woman-takes-man's-name probably rubbed both of us the wrong way more than any of the other options, perhaps not surprisingly. I grew up on the west coast, first in San Diego, moving to the Bay Area to attend Berkeley (and staying because I liked it), and my wife was a Georgia girl who got tired of the cultural climate in her home state, voluntarily packed up everything she owned into a convertible Mustang and drove across the country to San Francisco to start a new life. So "traditional" has never described either of us, and when it came to choosing a married surname, neither of us was all that keen to simply have her take my last name.
By the time we got married, we'd both been exposed to plenty of hyphenated couples, or even just people we knew who already had hyphenated last names because their parents chose that route. It always seemed like a bit of a load to carry around, especially for kids: "hi, I'm Jessica Rabinowitz-Chakraborty." Plus, believe it or not, we really did think about the exact issue you raise here: what happens to the next generation - and the one after that, and the next one - if most couples adopt the hyphenation solution? By the third or fourth generation, you've got kids with eight or sixteen last names? At some point, it just becomes untenable.
Which brought us to the solution you alluded to here: take a portion of each of our last names-of-origin, and create a new name. We were both a little bit apprehensive at first, but it quickly became apparent to us that we were onto something. After all, the entire point of hyphenating last names is because a couple wants to perhaps reject the culturally assumed patristic nomenclature of women abandoning their families of origin when they take a married name, and/or the hyphenating couple simply wants to honor BOTH families of origin (something of which we approve!).
But it struck me one day that if I were to discover a never-before-known comet, or a new element for the periodic table, or a new species deep in the rainforest or something, one of the things that comes along with creating (or discovering) something truly original like that is the undisputed right to NAME one's discovery. Why should marriage be any different? You're intentionally choosing to create a new family, a combination that has never existed before -- so why shouldn't IT have a new name, too? One that still respects and refers to the families from which it comes, but which is unmistakably its own entity, not just a tediously long laundry list of prior families?
So we did.
Because this is the Internet and all, I won't go into detail about which names were the original ones, and how we got to our current married name, but it was exactly what you suggest: a mixture of our previous last names. And we've never regretted it. Our children - like all children - will never know themselves as anything other than this last name (though of course we've told them how we did this), and we are a unique family entity.
I will say that we were lucky in that both of our surnames-of-origin were from the same general part of the world, making the combination relatively easy. We had friends in the Bay Area who wanted to do something similar, but their nationalities were just so different that any resulting combination would have been an unpronouncable mouthful. So I recognize it might be tougher for, say, a Pakistani man and a German woman than it was for my wife and I. Nevertheless, I don't regret our decision at all.
Just thought your readers might like to hear a real life example.