Long before they got engaged on a ridge in the Grand Tetons, they had talked about the future and children and names -- specifically their own surnames. She loved hers. He wanted to shed his.
Diana Bijon asked her boyfriend if he would take her last name if they got married.
"I always hoped I would meet a guy who would let my kids take my name. My name dies with me, and my sister and I love my dad so much," said Bijon, 28, an ER nurse at UCLA whose father is a French emigre.
Mike Buday, estranged from his father, felt little attachment to his last name. He agreed to change it.
"Diana's father, to a certain extent, is a father figure to me," he said.
A couple of years later, when Buday, 29, proposed marriage while on a backpacking trip, Bijon reminded him about their previous conversation.
"I said, 'Remember we talked about names? Are you really going to take my last name?' "
Buday, unfazed, said yes.
"It was," he said, "not a big deal."
Not until he actually tried to take his fiancee's last name.
On the marriage license application, which now costs $70 to file in L.A. County, Bijon could simply fill in her last name or her soon-to-be husband's last name.
But if Buday wanted to become a Bijon, he would have to get an order of the court to do so -- and not before he had filed a petition, paid $320, advertised public notice of his intention to change his name for four weeks in a local newspaper and then appeared before a judge.
"It strikes both of us -- especially me -- that this is not on equal ground," said Buday, now married to Bijon for more than a year but reduced to still using his, well, maiden name. "This is about gender equality."
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California agreed. Today the organization plans to file suit against the state of California in federal court, arguing that the difficulty a husband faces when changing his name to his wife's violates the equal protection clause provided by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
"This is important to the couple and it's important symbolically," said the local ACLU's legal director, Mark Rosenbaum, who called the current license application "the perfect marriage application for the 17th century."
When the couple, who live in Marina del Rey, sent an e-mail about their plight to the ACLU -- one of thousands of inquiries the group receives -- the organization took on the case with gusto.
