Polyamory in the News
. . . by Alan M.



August 6, 2013

"A poly wedding: My decision to marry my boyfriend while I'm legally married to my husband"

Offbeat Bride

Day before yesterday, Angi Becker Stevens had an article published at Salon about her family life with two partners and a 9-year-old daughter (see my post about it). A week before that, she wrote about their plans for next summer on a popular not-the-wedding-industry wedding site:


A poly wedding: My decision to marry my boyfriend while I'm legally married to my husband

Photo by Megan Finley
By Angi Becker Stevens

When my boyfriend first mentioned the possibility of getting married someday, I was taken by surprise.

"Sure, I'd marry you if it was legal," I told him. And he asked me: "Who cares if it's legal?"

We're polyamorous, and I've been legally married to my other partner for over a decade. But in spite of my longstanding support of same-sex couples who choose to marry even without legal recognition, and my deeply held belief that the state has no real business defining personal relationships in the first place, I had somehow never really considered that we were free to get married, too, regardless of whether or not the law would ever recognize it.

Once I began to seriously entertain the idea, it was a short leap to start daydreaming about the wedding. But as someone who's committed to challenging cultural norms, I was extremely hesitant to simply indulge those fantasies. I wanted to understand why I wanted a wedding, and to know I was doing it — if I did it at all — for the right reasons.

My boyfriend and I were already committed to sharing our lives together, building a family. Did I really need some kind of ceremony to solidify that? Would I just be buying in to social expectations, trying to make my non-traditional relationship appear more "normal" by getting married just like everyone else?...

...When I decided that I did want to go ahead with planning our wedding, it wasn't because I decided my motivations were somehow free of all social conditioning. It was because I finally realized that didn't really matter....


Read the whole article (July 31, 2013).

Angi tells us, "Being able to read the personal narratives of others (and share them with my husband) was extremely valuable to me when first embarking on living polyamorously. And being able to offer that kind of insight to other newly-poly or wishing-to-be-poly people is really meaningful to me."

She has written a brief piece on her blog about her back-to-back Offbeat Bride and Salon stories.
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While we're at it, here are other writers' articles at Offbeat Bride about poly weddings:

Wedding ceremony readings for polyamorous couples

Christine & Derek's misadventurous rainbow hodgepodge of freaks & geeks wedding

5 offbeat marriages that may benefit from the assistance of a lawyer

Milestone put out the call for Offbeat Brides, and here are the awesome results!

Commitment BDSM style: My vanilla, polyamorous, collaring ceremony

What polyamorists can teach brides about getting over petty wedding jealousies

Rosemary & Christopher's hippie pagan eco diy celebration of love

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1 Comments:

Blogger Sue said...

Thank you for sharing this. As the "third" in our family, I often hear myself wishing I could get married. It isn't that there is anything inherently less about my part of the triad relationship. It is just that deep, seemingly immutable wish for the affirmation of the community.

August 07, 2013 3:29 PM  

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