Back in the days when I was still an English teacher, one of the novels I taught my students was Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. During an early chapter, it is said of the book’s main female character, Bathsheba Everdene, that she would rather have a wedding than a marriage. “What does this fact show about Bathsheba’s character?” I would ask my class. They could give their answer immediately: that she is vain, shallow and self-centred.

If Bathsheba had been alive today, however, she could have gone one further than that: rather than coquettishly getting involved in a byzantine love-triangle between her three hopeful suitors, the young lady could simply have walked into the nearest Wessex wellness spa and promptly married herself, no man necessary.

Lamentably, this very idea, generally known as “sologamy” or sometimes “selfcest”, is a small but growing trend in today’s West. The practice seems to have begun in 1993 when a Californian (obviously) lady named Linda Baker married herself before a gathering of 75 friends and family in order to celebrate her 40th birthday. “It’s a cake thing,” the aptly-named Baker explained.

When sologamy first began, it was viewed as a pure joke. The first place I ever encountered the idea myself was on an episode of the legendarily bizarre and disturbing 2000 UK comedy sketch-show Jam, where a man risibly tied the knot with himself, an idea the scriptwriters evidently considered so absurd as to be entirely fictional in nature – which, unbeknownst to them, it was not. Another often-cited fictional self-wedding occurred in a 2003 episode of Sex and the City, “A Woman’s Right to Shoes”, in which the main character married herself purely in order to get a pair of expensive footwear as a wedding-present.

To illustrate why the idea was once considered fit only to provide material for comedy, here is an account of a rare male sologamist wedding, performed for and by an American hypnotherapist named Heron Saline back in 2002. Reading it, you can certainly see why Heron had previously remained still single:

“In August 2002 I married myself in a ceremony celebrated with some close friends in the Minnesota North Woods! … Because my spiritual community is very creative in focus, gender-fluid, and often somewhat theatrical in its expression of ritual celebration forms [i.e., highly gay] I decided on the following: I wanted to playfully externalize the former emotional neediness that I was leaving behind.

So I started out dressed in a beaded white wedding gown (which took about a year to find in thrift shops because I am a 6’3″ tall man) … I was [pretending to be] a bride getting stood up at her own wedding so I threw a really melodramatic hissy-fit on the lawn, which I had watered down to get the grass good and wet. Screaming and crying and pounding on the ground, I rolled around to get the neediness out of my system and grass stains all over the dress.

I sprayed Redi-Whip [whipped cream] in my mouth so I would literally appear to be foaming at the mouth. My guests loved all of this … [Then] I peeled back the upper half of the wedding gown and felt the sun on my skin, like a butterfly climbing out of a chrysalis … I gave myself a silver and lavender opal ring as a token of my commitment to be my own primary partner in life, and I spoke vows to myself that came right from my heart.”

Was Saline’s solution to his long-term loneliness a wise one? Back at the time, almost everyone sane would have said “No!”. Fast-forward two decades, and public opinion appears to have become somewhat more divorced from reality, upon this as upon so many other issues.

With this ring, I me wed

In our self-indulgent, Oprah Winfrey dictatorship age, concepts like “self-love” and “self-care” are all the rage, so it makes a kind of twisted sense that the notion of sologamy is now being presented in a positive light, as a novel manifestation of empowered late-stage feminism (most practitioners of selfcest being women).

A recent sympathetic exploration of the topic in UK newspaper The Independent praised the fad as “a way of sticking two fingers up to a system that deemed one woman’s ‘traditional’ lifestyle choices – a husband and kids – more serious and important than the ‘selfish’ alternative of staying single and lavishing money on one’s footwear.”

It also featured quotes from modern-day Bathsheba Everdenes like Rebecca Holberry, who married herself for her 40th birthday in June this year then “proudly” wrote up an account for a newspaper, saying things like “The more I thought about it, the more I realised my relationships had brought nothing but disappointment and drama. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I wanted a marriage any more. But the dress? The cake? The party? I definitely still wanted that.”

In Far From the Madding Crowd, Hardy eventually has his heroine grow out of such adolescent sentiments. Today, it seems real-life Bathshebas like Holberry never do. Another recent UK self-marrier, Sarah Wilkinson, spent £10,000 on her fake wedding day. “It was a lovely day for me to be the centre of attention,” she explained. There are far cheaper ways of doing that, I think. How about karaoke or becoming a stripper?

Fake Tanner?

One UK woman has even crafted an entire low-level media career out of the sad fact of her own self-wedding. Sophie Tanner married herself in Brighton back in 2015 in front of a cheering crowd. Non-UK readers may feel unsurprised to learn that Brighton is supposed to be the “Queer Capital” of Great Britain, our rough equivalent of San Francisco (i.e., a place to be avoided by normal people – including normal gays – at all costs).

Tanner is known online by the Instagram handle “thesologamist“, and has even written an “aspirational” Jane Austen-echoing chick-lit novel about her experiences, Reader, I Married Me.

To promote its launch in 2019, Tanner renewed her wedding vows by leading a “flash mob“ of queer-looking freaks like fake fetish bishops through Brighton; it is a simple truth, universally acknowledged, that if you are treating your own “wedding” as a PR event to launch a book, you are probably not all that serious about matters. Unsurprisingly, Tanner herself works in PR. It may be more apt to say she lives in PR. (She’s also a part-time “dog yoga teacher”, by the way.)

How did Sophie’s self-marriage pan out, then? Not very successfully, according to the following account:

“You’d think that in a solo relationship, it would be relatively free of drama. However, Sophie Tanner ended up meeting someone, and eventually ‘cheated’ on herself. The man – a polyamorist – turned temporarily to monogamy while he was dating Sophie. The relationship lasted about five months. Eventually, her partner dedicated himself to the same cause. He had a self-marriage ceremony just like Sophie. It’s unclear whether or not his choice to marry himself was what ended the relationship with her. It’s all a bit confusing, don’t you think?”

Is the bit where I say “I do”?

In a 2023 interview, Tanner demonstrated complete mastery of the current prevailing PR trick of justifying her every last action by making an appeal to modish left-wing feminist rhetoric:

“Historically, a marriage’s success depended on the woman’s willingness to subordinate her selfhood for the good of her husband and children. Today, when a woman has a wedding without a husband, it is an empowering response to a society that tells her she needs a man to live happily ever after. She refuses to feel ashamed, rejected or ‘left on the shelf’. She is choosing life – she is choosing herself.”

But isn’t this just a pseudish, politically-tinged, identitarian excuse for an act of profound innate narcissism? Not to Sophie:

“Narcissists don’t love themselves; quite the opposite … marrying yourself has nothing to do with vanity or seeking adoration. Sologamy is committing to being responsible for your own happiness and, as a result, becoming more emotionally available to accept and understand others. Developing a sense of self-worth, as opposed to insecurity, allows you greater capacity for human connection.”

Sophie really does sound like she loves herself.

Not wholly matrimony

Is sologamy legal? Only in the sense that it is not explicitly illegal. A bit like with the “objectum sexual” people who go around marrying inanimate objects like lava-lamps and lawnmowers whom I wrote about on Mercator (and elsewhere) earlier this year, marrying yourself is one of those things you can do, without it actually having any official legal basis to it.

If you meet someone else, you don’t have to get divorced before marrying them for real; if you have Multiple Personality Disorder and end up marrying all 163 separate personalities who live inside your own head, you won’t be prosecuted for bigamy.

Prenups would also have no legal validity, explained one helpful divorce solicitor when asked, upon the logical grounds that “If you’re marrying yourself, you only have claims against yourself financially – which makes it slightly nonsensical from a legal perspective.”

Talking of financial matters, when something becomes a trend, entrepreneurs quickly begin springing up to make easy money from it. One US company, imarriedme.com, offers highly affordable “Self-Wedding in a Box” kits, which come with a ring, ceremony instructions and vows, and a series of daily “Self-Affirmation Cards”, containing mantras of self-love you are supposed to recite to yourself on a daily basis, to ensure your continued extreme self-absorption.

What’s the point of that? The website explains all: “Did you know that micro-moments of positivity add up, creating an upward spiral? Positive mental states can also be enhanced by affirmations and even reshape us over time. A daily practice can help you focus on the good and give you resources when life is tough.” I think the traditional way of doing this used to be called “prayer” …

Although the company’s almost parodically American self-help slogan is “Say I Do To You!”, it turns out the firm was actually created by a married couple, husband-and-wife team Jeffrey Levin and Bonnie Powers. It seems Levin and Powers do not quite practice what they preach here. Still, they got a gushing promotional profile in Cosmopolitan magazine, and that’s all that really matters.

In mental illness and in health

You can also buy special 10-week $200 courses in how best to marry yourself from www.selfmarriageceremonies.com, which promises to guide you through the process of “becoming your own lover, best friend and parent/child.” What next? Self-adoption too?

“You are invited to walk down the aisle of your own heart and meet yourself unveiled,” declares the online blurb, before promising customers a series of potential sologamy benefits, even up to and including the option “perhaps to create a family”. How? Via parthenogenesis?

In terms of course-content, students get a single email every week, containing prompts for profound philosophical thought and imaginative prompts for how to self-design their own bespoke vows and ceremonial ritual of amoeboid union with oneself. These have expressive and eloquent titles like “What Matters in Your Wild and Precious Life”, “Facing Obstacles & the Many Ways We Play Small”, and “Prioritising Nourishment”.

“In marrying yourself, you unveil what you already deeply love and care about and commit to it. You allow what truly matters to be at the forefront of your life” – i.e., yourself. Could there ever be a greater summation of the mass societal solipsism of our age than that?

The course is devised and run by Dominique Youkhehpaz, a cultural anthropologist who somehow managed to “study love” at Stanford University, before demonstrating her vast expertise in the field by marrying herself on a farm in California in 2011. Who is Dominique, precisely? The only way the limitless bounds of her deep and meaningful personality can possibly ever be delineated is via the following lines of verse penned in tribute by one of her many satisfied students:

The essence of Dominique, how to describe?
So very awake and so very alive.
She lives in love, she sings like a dove,
Surely this angel was sent from above.

That student, I feel, may well have been a student of a certain William McGonagall (or possibly UK comedy duo Reeves & Mortimer from Shooting Stars). She continues in the same vein: “Wisdom is on her lips, truth is in her heart/And in an effortless dance she makes walls fall apart.” It makes her sound like an elephant.

Dominique does make some rather inflated claims for her course – such as that it will magically end all the eternal problems of mankind. “We live in a world full of abuse, misunderstanding, hatred, greed, lies, war, injustice, genocide, homicide, suicide, murder – and deep, deep suffering.” But why? Because “If we are at war with ourselves, surely it makes sense for us to be at war with each other.” The solution? To “access compassion through self-compassion”, by marrying ourselves: “Global healing begins with self-healing.” Can sologamy really help end genocide? If only Hitler had married himself back in 1933 rather than negligently waiting to get hitched to Eva Braun during his final days in the Führerbunker, history could have turned out so very, very differently.  

“Self-Marriage offers us a tool to create world peace through inner peace,” the Immortal Heavenly World-Teacher concludes. With sentiments like that on offer, it can’t be long before Dominique lands Meghan Markle as a client.