Sarah Brylinsky, a 34-year-old working in higher education in Ithaca,
N.Y., is legally married to 36-year-old farm manager Brandon Brylinsky.
Two years ago, on a camping trip a decade into their relationship, they
met 35-year-old Matte Namer, the founder of a real estate firm.
All three of them fell in love.
The Brylinskys and Namer are polyamorous, which means they are open to
romantic relationships with more than one person at a time. They started
going on dates together, and soon after, Namer moved in with the
Brylinskys. Now, the three plan to have a child, and they want to make their relationship official so that they can be recognized by their community as a family.
But how do you make a relationship official when there are three people in
it?
Polyamory is a form of consensual non-monogamy — when people have more
than one sexual or romantic partner at once with all partners’ permission.
A 2021 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that one in
nine single American adults had engaged in polyamory.
In legal terms, polyamorous people are unable to marry all their of
partners: It is
illegal throughout the United States to marry more than one person at a
time. Somerville, Mass., is thought to be the first U.S. city to
legally recognize polyamorous domestic partnerships, which it started doing in 2020.
However, people like Namer and the Brylinskys are utilizing an option that
symbolically, though not legally, binds all three of them: a commitment
ceremony.
Commitment ceremonies are events that celebrate any number of
people’s commitment to one another, and they can look many different ways,
according to Connecticut-based marriage and family therapist Kristen C.
Dew.
She’s seen some that “resemble the typical monogamous couples’ weddings,”
she said, while others are parties or outdoor gatherings. She also said
that “many opt for
handfasting ceremonies,” or choose unique items as symbols of their love.
The ceremony that Namer and the Brylinskys are planning will be similar to
a wedding. They’re discarding some traditions: They’ll have a cookie table
instead of a cake, for example. But they will all make vows to one
another. In addition, the Brylinskys will create a joint vow just for
Namer, and vice versa, they said.
“We met Matte as a couple; there was a relationship that came before them,
and it’s both important to establish that we made a family together and to
acknowledge that we transitioned our existing relationship to make room
for that,” Sarah said.
Ambyr D’Amato, a wedding planner based in New York, is helping to plan
this ceremony. She said she has worked with several other polyamorous
people on commitment ceremonies: In one of them, a couple that was already
married waited at the end of the aisle, and the third person walked down
the aisle to symbolically join them.
“It was important to [the third person], since they were not legally
married to anybody, that they had a ceremony where they could involve
their family and have things be more in the open,” D’Amato said. The event
took place in Central Park, she added, replete with flowers, champagne,
oysters and live music.
...Rachael, a 37-year-old writer, and Tom, a 36-year-old tech adviser —
both based in Santa Barbara, Calif. — were legally married for financial
and logistical reasons in 2015, but they publicly became each other’s
spouses during a commitment ceremony on the lawn of the Santa Barbara
courthouse six months earlier. ...
[They] said they are non-monogamous and are open to committing themselves
to an additional partner. Part of the reason they joined through a
commitment ceremony is so that, if they do decide to hold another one with
a third person, all three of them will be on the same footing, they said.
...Jessica Fern, a Boulder-based psychotherapist who works with
polyamorous people, touted the potential benefits of ceremonies like this.
“When someone experiences legal marginalization for their relationship
structure or style, commitment ceremonies can go a long way to deepen a
relationship, publicly acknowledge its significance, and even assuage some
of the pain and injustice that being a minority can create,” she said.
Fern’s clients who have undergone commitment ceremonies have reported
feeling more secure in their relationships as a result, she said: “They
have more of a structure that they can rely on that’s bigger than just
them. They can lean on each other in hard times, like, ‘I made this
commitment.’ ”
But many non-monogamous people say they don’t feel safe holding an event
as public as a commitment ceremony, because of existing stigma. And while
those in polyamorous relationships can work with lawyers to secure certain
legal protections (Namer and the Brylinskys are working with the
Chosen Family Law Center to ensure they all have equal status as parents of their
future child), a commitment ceremony does not confer the same rights as a
legal wedding.
Some non-monogamous people hope that this will change in the future. “We
have the right to be with our loved ones and share the resources that we
would normally get to share in a monogamous context,” Fern said. ...
