She took his name on the occasion of their marriage, like so many women still do. So now I ask this of you: What greater honor is there than that? She definitely didn’t have to, after all; she could just as easily have kept her own cognomen and in today’s world all would have been nice and peachy and no one would have taken undue notice or basically given a damn. But regardless she voluntarily chucked aside the surname of her father and adopted the last name of her new life partner, and let me assure you there was nothing in the world that could have made her new husband any prouder than that. Proud, absolutely, but he felt an undeniable sense of responsibility as well to continue honoring their now-shared last name to the nth degree so as not to give her any pause in the future for having made such a huge symbolic sacrifice to him. If she thought it was a name worth adopting and implicitly trusted him to uphold its nobility ad infinitum, he sure as hell didn’t want to be an ungrateful asshole and disappoint her through immorality or malfeasance.
Fred's Soapbox 