Name blending is an alternative practice that attempts to assign equal cultural value to each partner's surname.
In November 2012, it was reported that 800 couples in the United Kingdom had opted to blend their surnames thus far that year, primarily among "younger couples in their twenties or early thirties", with this being a leading reason for the issuance of Deed Polls to change names.
Surname blending can also occur in multiple steps, as when a double-barrelled is combined and condensed in later generations.
[9][10] The term Bennifer itself became popular, and started the trend of other celebrity couples being referred to by the combination of each other's first names, as with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie ("Brangelina"),[10][11] and Kanye West and Kim Kardashian ("Kimye").
[2] Robert Thompson, director of the Centre for the Study of Popular Television, said "as silly as it sounds, this new tendency to make up single names for two people, like 'Bennifer' (Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez) and 'TomKat' (Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes), is an insightful idea'.