Woman Will Marry Herself

By now we have all been browbeaten with talk about the importance of self-actualization, independence, and autonomy. We have been told, by the therapy culture, that we need to learn to love ourselves before we can love anyone else.

Surprisingly, this gospel has even reached Taiwan. There, a woman is going to love the illusion… by marrying herself. Link here.

The denizens of the therapy culture, like Anna North at Jezebel, find this a wonderful thing to do. Why not marry yourself? Isn’t this a supreme realization of self-love?

It has other advantages: No more problems with an unruly or untidy spouse. No more dirty laundry on the bathroom floor. No more toilet seat left up. No more fights about who is going to take the garbage out.

If you marry yourself you can have sex with your spouse whenever you want. He, she, or it will never be late, will never be out of synch with you, will never be out of touch, will never fail to return a phone call.

Put this way, how many people do you know who would happily marry themselves? Less frivolously, how many people make themselves unhappy because they compare their marriages to the kind of self-marriage that the woman in Taiwan will soon be entering.

Chen Wei-yih will invite friends and family to witness her nuptials. Then, we must imagine that she will consummate the union by having her way with herself. (We owe the original of this phrase to Elizabeth Gilbert.)

And then, for those who concern themselves with the survival of human community, she could try parthenogenesis… or maybe she could be cloned.