Lambert and Hermansen tied the knot on Saturday in an inclusive, gender-neutral Oakland, Maine ceremony after four years of dating
Mary Lambert has found a lifelong love to keep her warm!
The “Same Love” singer married her partner Wyatt Paige Hermansen in a romantic, rustic ceremony on Saturday in Oakland, Maine after four years of dating.
Lambert, 33, and Hermansen, a professor who uses they/them pronouns, tied the knot in an outdoor ceremony at Enchanted Gables, then celebrated afterward with a reception held in a barn on the grounds. Their wedding aesthetic embraced New England in the fall, foliage and all.
“It feels like the perfect mix of, ‘We’re on a farm but we’re also in our nice shoes!'” Lambert tells PEOPLE of her big day. “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 couple, who host the podcast The Manic Episodes together, exchanged vows they wrote themselves before 150 guests.
“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,” says Hermansen.
Their “beautiful” ceremony, which was officiated by close friend Leslie Yingling, included friends performing songs meaningful to the couple, and Lambert also had a pal on hand playing the harp.
The Grammy-nominated singer wore a “sparkly” Essence of Australia dress for the occasion that she picked out at Kleinfeld in New York City, a trip that will be chronicled in an episode of the TLC series Say Yes to the Dress.
Hermansen, meanwhile, got their burnt orange suit from a Brooklyn-based company called Bindle & Keep, which specializes in custom-tailored suits for gender-nonconforming clients.
“It was so amazing to go through the whole fitting process and have them be so sensitive to using my pronouns correctly and making sure to not talk about my body or what I was going to wear in a gendered way,” they say. “It’s been really amazing, their inclusivity is just incredible.”
The couple — who dubbed themselves “bride and broom” — forgoed traditional wedding parties in favor of “broomsbabes” and “bridesbabes,” with “captain” and “president” replacing the traditional maid of honor or best man roles.
“We thought it was really cute and funny,” Lambert explains of their creative wedding party twist. “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. Even myself — as a fat bride, to be like, ‘Oh, am I supposed to be losing weight right now?’ when I am very content with my body size. So there’s a lot of things we’ve been pushing against, and one of those was our wedding party.”
Adds Hermansen: “We just decided to go full-on maintaining the tradition while injecting a little bit of gender-radical, gender-neutral stuff.”
After saying “I do,” the couple, who live in Massachusetts, exchanged thin gold bands with an ivy vine design and three small diamonds that they got from a local jeweler named Rebekah Brooks.
They opted to feed their guests a “full-on, big-ass barbecue” with cornbread and potatoes from Big Tree Catering, plus a vegan curry option and a vanilla funfetti cake. Neither Lambert nor Hermansen drink, so they made sure to serve a signature mocktail — a mockingbird margarita — during cocktail hour.
“It’s important to us to be inclusive of other sober people,” says Hermansen. “We have a lot of friends and family who are also sober, and I know that this is becoming more common, thank goodness. It used to be, going to a wedding, you’d just be like, ‘Okay, guess I’m drinking club soda all night. This sucks.'”
A DJ spun tunes on the dance floor, though Lambert says she was “meticulously picking every single song to every single moment” ahead of the big day.
“I’m too much of a control freak to let that just go by the wayside,” she says, to which Hermansen jokes: “I feel like if the music wouldn’t be up to your liking, you would just storm up there anyway and start performing!”
Lambert did, in fact, perform at the reception; she and her mom Mary Kay Lambert, who is also queer, sang their duet “Love Is Love” together. For their first dance, the newlyweds chose Ella Fitzgerald’s version of the jazz classic “Misty.”
The day’s festivities came one day after the couple hosted a funky rehearsal dinner they dubbed the “Lovebird Tribute Concert,” which featured tacos and an open mic so that their friends could take the stage.
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“We wanted to have some structure, but we also just wanted it to be a very big love fest, free-for-all, like a big open mic essentially, because Mary and I just know so many talented, creative people,” says Hermansen. “We wanted to just let them have a flag pole to fly their freak flag.”
The wedding was four years in the making for Lambert and Hermansen, who first met on Tinder in May 2018. At the time, both were fresh off difficult breakups, and neither was interested in a long-term relationship.
Hermsansen says they did not know who Lambert was, despite her fame — which made the “Secrets” singer wonder if her future spouse was actually “big-time stalking” her, and was just pretending to be in the dark.
“It was because everything that Wyatt said seemed so perfectly tailored — there’s no way an actual person feels this way and would respond this way to things,” Lambert explains. “[They must’ve been] just trying to impress me.”
Alas, it was the real deal. The two bonded over their mental health struggles, and Lambert says their connection “was pretty instant.”
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“I knew that we were going to fall in love,” she says, explaining that she exercised caution in jumping head-first so as to avoid the heartbreak of previous relationships.
Hermansen, too, knew quickly that Lambert was the one. The pair were engaged in November 2021.
“It’s really common for queer people to be really cynical about marriage,” they say. “But when I met Mary, she was just as starry-eyed about the idea of getting married as I was. She had the whole fantasy in her heart and it just meant so much to me to meet somebody who I could see myself with in that way.”
To keep things on the right track, they sought relationship counseling one month in, as they were “ready to make that investment” in each other, says Lambert.
“I feel like being married for queer people is… I don’t know if it’s the same for straight people, but I feel like we’re allowed in. We did it,” she says. “I want to be recognized this way. I want to be recognized as a married couple.”
As for what’s next, the pair are looking forward to a future honeymoon in Japan — and to growing their family.
“We’re going to have kids soon!” says Lambert, who adds that she’s currently working on an album focused on body image and self-acceptance. “Our marriage is going to be the bond and this vow that is the foundation of this family.”
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