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Louise Thomas

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Hi. It’s Carrie Bradshaw. I wanted to let you know that I’m getting married. To myself. Oh, and I’m registered at Manolo Blahnik. So… thanks. Bye!”

A single, unattached and childless Carrie leaves this iconic phone message on an episode of Sex and the City after her expensive designer shoes get stolen from a baby shower. It was a way of settling the score; 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. Carrie had no real intention of marrying herself; she just wanted her snarky friend to shell out the $485 required to replace a pair of lost Manolos. But it turns out the main character we all love to hate was way ahead of her time.

Cut to more than 20 years later and the practice of marrying yourself, otherwise known as “sologamy” or “autogamy”, seems to have become far more popular, if not quite fully mainstream. In June this year, Rebecca Holberry proudly wrote in Metro about the decision to throw herself a lavish, solo wedding for her 40th birthday following two serious relationships that ultimately failed and five years of single life.

“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,” she said. “But the dress? The cake? The party? I definitely still wanted that.”

In the autumn of last year, 42-year-old credit controller Sarah Wilkinson also decided to tie the knot to herself after saving for 20 years for the Big Day that never came. She splashed out £10,000, wore a sequinned white dress, was walked down the aisle by her mother and made vows to herself (including never to relinquish control of the TV remote).

“It was a lovely day for me to be the centre of attention,” she told the BBC. “The ceremony wasn’t an official wedding but I had my wedding day. I think you get to the point where you think, ‘I might not have this with a partner by my side, but why should I miss out?’ That money was reserved for my wedding – it was a case of, it’s there and why not use it for something I want to do?”

Further afield, Kshama Bindu caused a nationwide stir in 2022 when she became the first person in India ever to practice sologamy, throwing a ceremony that included the traditional body art and cleansing rituals associated with Hindu weddings. It sparked controversy at the highest level, with politicians branding it a form of “wokeness” bordering on insanity and claiming it went against religion.

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Then there’s body image coach Danni Adams, 30, who threw an outdoor self-wedding with 40 guests in Florida in 2022 after going to therapy and declaring it an important act of self-love; and, perhaps most movingly, 77-year-old Dorothy Fideli, who married herself in front of her three children and a couple of dozen people at her retirement home in Goshen, Ohio in 2023. She pushed her decorated walking frame down the aisle to the strains of her favourite song, Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me”.

“I felt beautiful, like I had won a lottery or something. I felt like a queen,” she told CNN. “I felt important to myself… like I was somebody. It’s hard to explain the feeling – you have to feel it in your soul.”

Back in the UK, copywriter Sophie Tanner, known by her Instagram handle “thesologamist”, even wrote a novel inspired by the experience of marrying herself back in 2015. To celebrate the launch of Reader, I Married Me four years later, she renewed her vows with a flash mob through Brighton.

But is sologamy legal? Can you divorce yourself? And does marrying yourself prevent you from marrying someone else?

“No, is the short answer,” says Kate Ryan, a partner in the family team at Seddons Solicitors. “There’s nothing legally binding about any ceremony in which you say you’re marrying yourself. It has no legal standing or validity.” This is true the world over: “As far as I’m aware, it’s not recognised anywhere, for the obvious reason that it just involves one person,” says Ryan. “There’s nothing jurisdictionally speaking, from a family law perspective, that applies. No institution or body recognises it either.”

It means there’s no need to ever divorce yourself, as there are “no legal principles from which you would have to ask a court to adjudicate on; there are no threads in the justice system to tie up when it comes to the notion that you’re married to yourself”, she adds. This is largely due to the lack of financial complications when it’s just me, myself and I getting hitched. “If you get married to another person in the UK, you automatically have rights against that person’s financial assets, including their estate and pension. If you’re marrying yourself, you only have claims against yourself financially – which makes it slightly nonsensical from a legal perspective.”

Marry yourself, then, and you’re more than entitled to marry another person in the future – minus the accusations of polygamy.

Despite its lack of legal recognition, the practice has been around for around 30 years. An American woman named Linda Baker is believed to be the first person on record to become an official sologamist – she married herself to celebrate her 40th birthday in 1993, witnessed by 75 of her family and friends and enlisting the help of seven bridesmaids. “It’s about doing things for yourself and not waiting around for someone else to make it happen,” she said of her headline-grabbing nuptials.

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Critics have derided sologamy as being narcissistic – the product of an increasingly self-obsessed, individualistic society. Even mentioning the notion down the pub I was met with derogatory remarks and pulled faces, as if I’d told an unnecessarily crude joke in bad taste. But the sologamists themselves – the overwhelming majority of whom are women – describe it as the ultimate act of self-acceptance and self-love that can lead to greater empathy for others.

“Marrying yourself has nothing to do with vanity or seeking adoration,” writes Tanner. “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.”

It doesn’t have to mean a commitment to staying single either. “Through sologamy, I’m saying that self-love is as important as romantic love – but they can both feature in my life,” she adds. “I think it’s an important skill to learn to be happy on your own. Even when you are part of a couple, it’s liberating to seek solitude and enjoy your own company.”

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Tanner sees sologamy as a response to a Western world with an ever-growing lack of spiritualism at its core, despite the fundamental function that ritual plays in defining our identity and furthering our development. Other cultures have coming-of-age ceremonies which act as a gateway to adulthood and independence; in the UK and the US, people are choosing to marry later in life or not at all, “which means they have nothing to mark their personal milestones”, she posits. “A self-wedding offers an opportunity to officially recognise a feeling of personal growth.”

This attraction to ritual we feel as human beings could hold the key to why solo weddings appeal. According to Professor Harvey Whitehouse, chair of social anthropology at the University of Oxford and author of Inheritance: The Evolutionary Origins of the Modern World, the reason we feel the need to conduct weddings and funerals “boils down to two kinds of inheritance – biological and cultural. The biological aspect has to do with the way our brains evolved.”

The way our brains work makes us think that major life transitions – like dying and getting married – “involve changes of status that have to be marked in certain ways,” he says. “But the specific ways in which we conduct marriages and funerals clearly differ from one society to the next – these specific traditions are culturally inherited rather than biologically inherited. Both forms of inheritance make us want to carry out weddings and funerals.”

As for adapting the traditional wedding ceremony to suit a single person, there is an anthropological “bonding” incentive to explain the draw of sologamy in certain societies. If more and more people are choosing to live alone, “that is a lifestyle that they might still feel the need to transition into and to mark ritually,” adds Whitehouse. “To do so, they draw on their evolved psychological inheritance but also their cultural traditions to work out a way of making that transition feel real. And in the process, they are bonding with others who participate in their weddings, as well as bonding vicariously with a growing subgroup of fellow sologamists.”

He argues that, far from being selfish or narcissistic, sologamy can be a force for good: “If marrying yourself is done in a way that allows you to share the experience with family and friends, then it likely has a bonding effect for those kinds of groups. And bonds like this are important in making us better citizens in various ways.” Not only that, this movement of women refusing to wait for a potential love interest to sweep them off their feet and creating their own empowering ritual instead “may be contributing to new forms of female emancipation”.

In fact, sologamy could just be the most radical of feminist acts. “Historically, a marriage’s success depended on the woman’s willingness to subordinate her selfhood for the good of her husband and children,” argues Tanner. “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.”

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