Mary Lambert said “Same Love” when she married her same-sex partner, Wyatt Paige Hermansen, in a very romantic New England wedding. The loved-up pair dated for four years before exchanging rings at Enchanted Gables in Oakland, Maine.
The couple challenged wedding party tradition: they were referred to as “bride and broom” (to signify Wyatt’s gender non-conformity), selected “broomsbabes” and “bridesbabes” to stand by their sides at the ceremony, with “captain” and “president” replacing “maid of honor” and “best man.”
”We thought it was really cute and funny,” Lambert tells PEOPLE. “We were trying to find other couples like us in bridal magazines and I just didn’t see it. I know they’re out there, but it has felt a little constricting, a lot of the gender dynamics… There’s a lot of things we’ve been pushing against, and one of those was our wedding party.”
It was important to the pair that they exchanged their own unique vows. “With both of us being writers, and obviously Mary being an artist and a poet and someone who expresses herself creatively, it was really important for us to have room to say our own vows,” Wyatt says.
The wedding’s aesthetic was equally original! “It feels like the perfect mix of, ‘We’re on a farm but we’re also in our nice shoes!'” Lambert says. “We didn’t want it to look like anybody else’s wedding. We really want it to be us. We wanted to be the wedding that people look at and say, ‘I want to do that.'”
The vows symbolize more than love. Mary was born to a Pentecostal family in Everett, Washington. When Lambert was six, she saw her family be excommunicated from the Church when her mom came out as a lesbian and divorced her dad.
“We lost all of our friends along with our community,” Mary said to AfterEllen. “We really did get shunned. And it wasn’t even all about my mom being a lesbian, it was about her divorcing my dad.”
The Church’s alienation of Mary’s family didn’t stop the singer from seeing the good in people. “This is going to sound so stupid, but I care so much about humanity. Everyone can be a good person, but we’ve forgotten our connection with each other, and that’s how terrible things happen. Humanity can be really ugly, but I think it can be repaired. As a society we’ve forgotten how to love somebody you don’t know, and fixing that really starts with being honest about how you’re feeling.
“We’re so worried about judgement that we end of judging other people. The moment you allow yourself to be vulnerable by saying ‘I hate the way I look’ or ‘I wonder how the world would be if I was dead,’ things change. Most people, if not all people, has had those types of feelings. So why can’t we say it? When you’re honest about who you are, you build bridges, and that’s what I’m trying to do.”
