My ex-wife and I took each other's names and hyphenated them in 1990. At
the time, we were the only people we knew who were doing that.that is to
say, we were the only people we knew where the man actually took upon
and used a hyphenated name. Anyway, I thought this matter through long
and hard and my solution is both elegant and completely practical.

I had three design requirements which absolutely had to be met: 1)
parity/equality between the sexes in all ways; 2) familial identity (all
member of a nuclear family have the same surname); 3) and of course
that names wouldn't combine in a way that was a neverending increase in
length.

In the end I decided that as a practical matter in the West, the
ordering of the two names didn't imply the primacy of one over the
other because for some purposes the one has primacy (such as the first
when in the context of alphabetization) while in others the second
may be percieved to have priority (because of middle-names and such,
the second name, I think, has an implicit primacy in our culture). So
I figured that you adopt a protocol concerning the order.I chose
matronymic-patronymic.and not worry that it implies an ultimate primacy
of one over the other.

My plan was to assume the system already in place and thus a hyphenated
name that resulted from marriage could be understood as being a
matronymic-patronymic formation. Resulting children take that form. But
when they marry, male children abandon their mother's matronym and
replace it with their spouse's matronym, and similarly for the female
and their patronym from their father replaced by the patronym from their
husband.

The result of this is that all three requirements are met but especially
the most important and satisfying implication of the first requirement
was met in a truly satisfying way: as we now have patronymic lineages
with which we form a part of our core identity around, in my scheme
we'd still have patronymic lineages but we'd also have matronymic
lineages. All male descendents from "Smith-Brown" would have names
in the form of Mr. something-Brown while all female descendents of
"Smith-Brown" would have names in the form of "Smith-something". And
while everyone would give up part of the name that formed their
childhood familial identity (the opposite sex portion), so also would
everyone keep a part of their name that formed their childhood familial
identity.

In the fifteen years hence, I've heard of only one other person also
coming up with this exact scheme, and it mefi's own "dame". But I think
it's very elegant and in a way obvious and I'm surprised more people
didn't adopt it or plan to adopt it. (You'd have to have a subsequent
generation marrying for it to actually be realized.) I always like to
pipe up when the subject arises because I do feel it's by far the best
solution to this sexist problem in our culture.

By the way, as the quote above implies, although I did subsequently hear
of a lot of married couples taking each others' names as my ex-wife and
I did, I remain skeptical about the number of men that well and truly
used their new names. I certainly did, though, and in a very public way
as my alma mater has the tradition of always addressing everyone as Mr.
so-and-so, Ms. so-and-so in all classroom situations. So although the
marriage only lasted five years, and my name was reverted in the divorce
decree, "McIntyre-Ellis" to this day remains a big part of my identity
for that reason. To my classmates, that's who I'll always be.