names can cause confusion

public records … no good

Not all public records are regularly updated, so we soon got used to receiving mail addressed to both Gunlaug Solås and Gunlaug Sørtun from public offices, and in a few cases both family names were included for good measure. No big deal we thought … they would probably get it right soon.
Clearly we were a little too optimistic on the matter, as it took at least eight months, and a couple of notes from us, for the local3 public offices to get the name right. And, we are not sure if all official records are put straight yet.

To complicate matters a little more: her private business (the farm) does for the time being go by the name Gunlaug Sørtun in official records, as changing business name is an entirely different issue.
Apart from that, the “name issue” is pretty unproblematic in contact with officials – we are just numbers for taxation to them anyway.

One of Gunlaug's regular farm business connec­tions also got seriously confused, and even after having been told several times that there had been a name-change, one or more people in their ranks kept on changing Gunlaug's surname back to mine, probably with good intentions since they knew we were not divorced.

After several months we finally managed to make the right people understand that this was all about a simple change of name, not a change of status, and then things fell back to normal.

On the internet both surnames are found for Gunlaug S. This will probably always be the case, as old info will exist along with any new, and new info is not always correct or corrected. No big deal, as in general information on the internet is not very accurate.
On-line phone registers vary in how updated they are for Gunlaug S. Depending on which register you look at, one or the other surname is found. Both names are pointing to the correct phone number, but you may not find the surname you are looking for so that doesn't help much.

Lately I have had people I know dismiss my phone calls – business and private, because our land-line phone number is registered on Gunlaug and it therefore is her surname that shows up at the other end.
Not everyone is familiar with Gunlaug's “new” surname in relation to me, and on busy days it is easy to dismiss phone calls from “unknown” people.

On rare occasions some also try to play with the fact that my wife and I now have different sur­names, in ways and for reasons that are not entirely nice and honest. That kind of “game” tends to stop rather quickly when we start to play along…

Now and then even Gunlaug and I stumble on her surname, and have to correct ourselves. We don't get more fun in life than we create ourselves though, and such unintended name-mixups on our part can be very efficient icebreakers when handled right.