My husband and I discussed various names in both of our family trees and ways to combine them and other options as well as talking with a few other people before deciding on one we would share. For the last couple of decades it's equally been both of our names.
We started the name discussions because I was the process of adding a new name and changing my entire name in legal paperwork. My birth certificate name and the one I was raised with where we part of the discussions, but they weren't considered beyond some combining things we briefly considered (not double barrelling, putting part of different names together). It was a natural part of my working towards my dreams of a new name in adulthood and our conversations on what we wanted going forward in life.
I don't really have any regrets, but I didn't really have much experience with the new names outside of the area we currently live with people I already knew before I started to use it as a community name so when I ran into some imaginative spellings and mispronunciations of a 2 syllable, 4 letter first name and a only slightly longer surname, it was a bit jarring. Not sure how better to prepare for that, but it would have been nice to have someone say that it's normal as I was happy to hear since. It is part of why some of my work is under a different name. I've had no issues with using different names for work and yes, another part is enjoying having different names in those areas that I can put aside.
Any name I've used is 100% mine, they are all me, whether it's the name given on my birth certificate, used for me as a child, one of the ones I've chosen for myself or chose with my husband. The whole idea that a woman "takes" a surname if she changes it at marriage rather than a couple or family shares a surname is a perspective I struggle with, but then I come from a background and family where changing names and adding on names with life changes, and having multiple names is part of life and not that unusual.
I do sometimes have issues with not using a title, which is legally not required and legally not considered part of our names, but some government departments and others struggle with going against the late Victorian ideal of everyone having a social title. These threads always bring out the debates on marital name change, but I find required titles - and the fact that all feminine social titles aren't even a full word in English, we need professional titles for that - far more hold up ideas of archaic propriety than optional name changes.
But what about having, say your passport in one name, driving license in another.Bank accounts with one name or the other
UK law allows people to use multiple names as legal names, and any name one is common known as can be treated as a legal name with or without ID in that name. Anyone can revert back to their birth certificate if they change it, though there are some questions around if one uses a statutory declaration to change it that you might need another to change it back as it involves formally stating you're not going to use that name anymore though there is no case law of that being enforced to my knowledge.
That said, some government departments will specify which name they will use - the Home Office will only use the name on a passport and barring very few circumstances requires all passports and IDs they issue to be in the same name. Other departments like HMRC do not care at all and you can change a name in a few minutes online with them. If there is a legal issue around multiple names, passport usually takes priority, along with longest used and/or most well known by. Birth certificate oddly doesn't in cases I know other than as evidence as longest used.
Due to this, at one point I had legal paperwork in three names and submitting immigration evidence in four. I never had an issue opening or using bank accounts, I used my passport in my birth certificate name to prove my identity on my bank accounts in different names and in fact, getting a provisional license in my current community name is what allowed me to update my US SSN which enabled me to update my passport 17 years after I'd changed my name. I only bothered because of the Home Office's policy as I wanted my naturalisation certificate to have the name I use in my daily life (they actually have both the birth certificate name and the current name, but I wanted the latter on it too).