On the day of her wedding, Janie Coppola, 30, overslept. She woke up to a friend banging on her bedroom window, and had to quickly do her hair before rushing to the venue, a dreamy castle in Chattanooga, Tennessee. Fortunately, the rest of the day went smoothly, and on the afternoon of 18 October, she walked down the aisle in a big white dress to be wed to her husband. And her wife.
“Your favorite throuple got hitched,” Margaret French, 32, Janie’s wife, captioned an Instagram post about the day.
The wedding was ceremonial, says Margaret, a marketing director and owner of Margaret French Presents, a company that hosts “creative escapes”. “We can’t get legally married. That would be bigamy,” she adds. (Bigamy, or being married to multiple people at the same time, is illegal in all 50 states.)
She, Janie, and their husband, Cody Coppola, 36, have been together since 2016. Cody, a sales rep, and Margaret got legally married in 2018, mostly for insurance purposes. Janie, a communications manager, is not technically married to either of them, but all three refer to each other as spouses.
They also worked with a legal expert to pull together documents that would allow them “to get as close as you can get to legally married without being legally married”, Margaret explains. These include wills, life insurance and power of attorney. The throuple co-owns a house in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and Janie is in the process of legally taking Cody’s last name.
Having a wedding ceremony was important to the spouses.
“Doing the big, public wedding where we spent way too much money and invited too many people was our way of saying: this is real, this is legit, we’ve been together almost a decade and this is our celebration of that,” Margaret says.
Margaret and Janie discussed what it was like to plan a wedding for three. (Cody was unavailable – “getting the three of us right now is nearly impossible,” Margaret says.)
Getting together
Margaret French: Cody and I met on Tinder in January 2016. Cody and I pretty much partnered up immediately, and we moved in together after nine months. We were monogamous for half a second. We started dating other women very casually, and then, in November, we met Janie. It was supposed to be a hookup, and then she never went home.
It took a while to make it official – we were best friends with benefits for over a year.
Janie Coppola: Almost two years.
MF: Almost two years. In the six months before we got married, Cody and I were like, ‘Oh, we’re in love with Janie.’ So we defined our relationship, and Janie became our partner.
JC: I had told Maggie that I loved her a couple of months before she got married to Cody [in 2018]. And by [the time of that] wedding, I had not told Cody I loved him.
MF: We progressed at different rates.
JC: I did [tell him] shortly after that. It wasn’t super serious until right around that point, and then it happened very quickly.
I was one of 14 guests at their wedding. It was very small. Maggie’s whole family knew about me. Cody hadn’t told his family yet. He was waiting until after the wedding.
Maggie and Cody both checked on me throughout the day to make sure I was doing okay. We spent the whole day together. I helped them get ready, and I provided breakfast for the wedding party. I was like the maid of honor. It was really sweet and special to be included.
MF: Cody and I got married because we loved each other, but also for insurance. So it was romantic and beautiful and all of that, but we wouldn’t have gotten married that quickly if it weren’t for insurance. It was not the fairytale dream wedding, which is why we did this one.
We all moved to Tennessee in 2020, and that’s when we were like, we’ve made this cross-country move and we have three cats together – we are a family for all intents and purposes, and we want to get married.
The proposal
MF: In 2022, we got engaged. Janie knew something was happening. She had picked out her ring, but we didn’t tell her when we purchased it.
We did a photoshoot with a friend of ours who was a photographer. I told Janie that we were just doing a fun photoshoot with a friend. Then Cody showed up, and we did a surprise proposal, which was very cute.
The bachelorette(s) party
MF: We planned on getting married in 2024. But at the beginning of 2021, we had bought a house that was condemned and spent 18 months and all of our money renovating it. We looked at how much we still owed on the house, the renovation, and how much we wanted to spend on a wedding, and decided to wait another year.
We also decided to have a big bachelorette party. So we delayed the wedding, but had the bachelorette party in 2024. We went to New Orleans, and paid for an AirBnB for 22 people. That sounds insane until you think of it as two bachelorette parties – 11 people each. It’s still a lot.
Cody didn’t have a bachelor party. He and his buddies play Dungeons and Dragons and they’ll do board game nights. I think they had a special D&D weekend while we were gone.
The planning
MF: Janie took care of all the logistics, and I took care of the aesthetics. I knew I wanted it to feel like a fairytale. A lot of that was decided when we found our venue, which looked like a castle.
JC: I did a lot of prep. I was the one who organized venue viewings, hired vendors, did the budget, the website, the registry, and the thank you cards. Maggie did decorations. She had a whole backdrop – she made a moon and a banner. She did flowers, candles and place cards. She and Cody made little 3D printed cats for each seat to represent which meal people were getting (it was very standard wedding food: chicken marsala, pasta primavera, or salmon).
We had meetings once a week as a family where we would discuss if there were any outstanding issues and make sure that we were on track with the budget.
MF: [Cody’s job was] he showed up on the day. And he paid. [Laughs.] He helped me a lot with my bigger builds. The finicky, technical stuff that I needed support on, that was him. One of the nice things about having three of us is if we needed him, we asked him for help and he did it.
JC: But there was nothing that we initially really needed him for. Other than what he did do, which was helping with the seating chart. He also was managing our emotions, which is a full time job.
MF: [While] building the house, we got past any difficulties about choosing stuff and who’s in charge. Once we got to the wedding, we were like, we’re good at this, we communicate really well.
The wedding day
MF: We didn’t have a wedding planner or coordinator. We did all the set up the day of. I had spent the last eight months making everything. My best friend and I got to the venue at eight, then a bunch of family members showed up at nine, and we were pretty much fully set up by noon.
JC: Not having a bridal party made everything so much easier. We weren’t managing anyone’s emotions but our own. It was wonderful. A day where everyone’s fawning all over you.
MF: [At the ceremony] Cody did the traditional thing and walked up [the aisle] first. Since I had already gotten my white dress bride moment back in 2018, I wanted to make sure Janie had her big moment. I wore a buttery gold dress, and came out second. Janie came out last, and she was walked down the aisle by Cody’s dad and my mom.
JC: My mom could not come because she said it was against her religion. But I had both sides of their families walking me down and giving me away, and that was sweet.
MF: We didn’t have any idea where we were going to stand until the rehearsal. My brother was the officiant, and we had him stand to the side of us instead of behind us. Janie and I were on either side of Cody, in a semi-circle angled toward the audience so everyone could see us.
We created our own idea of what we wanted [a wedding] to be. Not being just two people, things automatically changed. We exchanged rings three times and there were four kisses total. [Each person kissed each other, and then Janie and Margaret kissed Cody’s cheeks.]
Our first dance, we totally messed up. Our choreographer is our realtor. I told him I would send him a video of the dance, but I can’t. He was so excited, and it’s horrible. We decided we were going to do three groupings: [Janie] and I danced first and Cody stood to the side, then Janie went off and Cody and I danced. And then I went off and he and Janie danced. Then we just grabbed people. It kind of fell apart at the end.
What they learned
MF: My advice to other polyamorous couples who want to get married is to be selfish, and make the day about you and your love.
JC: My number one piece of advice is don’t invite anyone you wouldn’t buy dinner for.
