I agree with the fact that it's easier for everyone to share the same name, especially when one parent travels alone with the kids. It's such a faff (with good reasons) if you don't have the same.

The issue is more that it's often assumed that the wife has to take the husband's name by default, rather than it being ultimately a choice between the couple.

The Spanish system is superior:
FirstName(s) Parent1LastName Parent2LastName

To clarify it's the first last name of both parents, and you can choose the order with the condition all children of same parents must have the same order.

Here, there is no surname. every name is a given name. Yes, even something like Abdul Juan Michael Obama Pierre can be a full given name of one guy.

Icelandic patronyms like to have a word. You can have a 4 person family and nobody has the same "last name"

where I live, kids still usually take on their father’s name (sometimes the names are combined), but the mother almost never takes on her husband’s name. so yes, usually the mother will be an outlier in her family, last name wise.

i don’t think mothers were i live are less connected to their family because of it, tho

(altho, personally, i still don’t like the fact that it’s expected for kids to take on their father’s name, it feels like a relic of a shitty system better left in the past)

Couples I've known who both had double-barrelled surnames before marriage generally combined one of the names from each of their names to create a new double-barrelled name, which is what their new family and kids use. E.g. A-B marries X-Y and they become B-Y or X-A or whatever.

Sometimes, the missing parts of the surname get given to specific children as middle names. Which is a nice way of acknowledging older family members without burdening your kid with an old or boring name.

I agree it's so much eeasier. It's kinda weird how much stuff gets easier when you just say "that's my wife/husband". It magically erodes a lot of barriers. People rarely check, but if they do they seem to only go as far as making sure the last names match.

The legal use is 2 surnames, father mother, people can often recite combinations to several generations back, but that is really ancdotic, although it makes genealogy pretty straight forward

Wellcome to the Spaniard custom, probably older than your country 🫠