My mom, now 20-some years divorced, still carries my father's last name.  My wife kept her maiden name, but our kids have my last name.  We had all sorts of issues in the beginning, with people not matching everyone up.  When we bought our house, they messed up the paperwork because they didn't realize that we were married.  Luckily the fix was just changing a few words on the papers.  Now my wife has unofficially hyphenated, and it has made life much easier.  It shouldn't need to be so difficult--what's in a name, indeed.