> However, my wife hated that her last name was near the end of the alphabet growing up.
Just exhausting.
> We opted to hyphenate.
Isn't that tradition in a significant portion of the world? So by bucking tradition, you really meant you traded one tradition for an even older tradition.
You managed to combine snarky reductio ad absurdum and a gratuitous attack on his wife in three sentences. Why wouldn't someone be annoyed by that?
Unless you were married earlier than the 90s, I wouldn't really call that "bucking tradition" any time from, say, the mid-90s onwards.
If you really want to buck tradition, then don't get married - just live together, and have kids :-)
(After all, there's nothing more traditional than marriage, is there?)
But you hit on an important point — a lot of couples are just skipping marriage now.
We went halfway there — we bought the house together years before we got married.
My last name starts with E and my wife's with Y. Bucking tradition, she didn't change her name when we got married, so when we had kids we had to decide what name to give them. We opted to hyphenate.
Historically, hyphenated last names were [Woman's last name]-[Man's last name]. However, my wife hated that her last name was near the end of the alphabet growing up.
We bucked tradition once again and put my name first, so that when sorted alphabetically they would be at the front of the list. Incidentally their first names start with A and B so that they show up at the front when sorted by first name too.