John and I have been married more than 10 years and I remain sort of wishy-washy on the maiden name vs. married name debate.
 
I never legally changed my name — my driver’s license and passport still say Colleen Newvine — so technically I decided. I go by Colleen Newvine at work.
But on my blog and when I get freelance bylines, I’m Colleen Newvine Tebeau. I refer to this as the Hillary Rodham Clinton solution.
Occasionally when we’re socializing, I simply introduce myself as Colleen Tebeau, especially if I’m out with John or with people who know him. It’s easy shorthand for “I’m his wife.”
This New York Times piece suggests I was right to have reservations about dumping my maiden name. They reported on a study asking students about perceptions of women based on whether they changed their names:

Participants thought that a hypothetical woman who took her husband’s surname was “more caring, more dependent, less intelligent, more emotional, less competent, and less ambitious in comparison with a woman who kept her own name.”
By contrast, the same woman who kept her maiden name “was judged as less caring, more independent, more ambitious, more intelligent, and more competent, which was similar to an unmarried woman living [with her partner] or a man.”

I’m irritated by the notion that being caring and intelligent are at odds with one another — that I can’t be both competent and emotional.
But I guess that wasn’t the point of the study. It was to highlight how society sees us based on our name change decision.
I kept my name because:

• I was nearly 30 when I got married and I didn’t want to sever ties with anyone who knew me when I was single
• I was a writer with my maiden name on my bylines for all my past work
• As a journalist, good contacts define your ability to do your job. I didn’t want my sources confused about who I was when I called
• I was lazy. I’d seen a coworker fighting with Northwest Airlines to change her name on her frequent flier account so she could connect her previously accumulated miles with those she was racking up as a married woman and it looked exhausting.

This was before Facebook so I couldn’t just throw my maiden name in parentheses on my profile to ensure anyone looking for the old me could find me. I didn’t even own a computer with an Internet connection at the time so my decision was based on the old school ways you connected — by phone, in print, with phone books.
Will our perceptions change now that it’s easier to blur those lines, with a connection to your maiden name in your Facebook profile or on your website?
Or is it more about the statement women make about whether their identity changes because of marriage?