Hot tip, change HIS last name prior to the wedding and she gets the name change free.
I know a couple that waited until after the wedding to do that and the husband changed his name, then the wife was given the option of keeping her old name, or switch to his old name.
She ended up having to go through the entire name change process without the benefit of the auto-name flip from the marriage.
This is really interesting, because in my state in Australia, this process isn't gendered at all. The man can take the woman's name just as easily, same with same-sex marriages.
Warning: Taken from decades-old memories of things that I wasn't involved in or paying much attention to! Anyway...
In Virginia a man sued the state like 30 years ago because they wanted to charge him to change his name, when a woman could change her name free when she got married. The state could either have charged women or made it free for all. They chose the later.
Yeah, that's what we are running into. The marriage forms here in NC make it simple to take the husband's last name as part of the process, but any other kind of change requires a lot of crazy, expensive, and time consuming steps.