Why Not Marry Yourself?

I first wrote about this in 2012. You would think that that would have been enough time for the nation and its psycho professionals to get it out of their minds. But, alas, it is continuing, and it is even becoming something of a trend.

I am talking about self-marriage. Yes, indeed. If you are having trouble finding a suitable mate, if dating has not been going very well, if you are tired of the bar scene, the club scene and the hookup scene… well, you can solve your problems by marrying yourself. Invite all your friends and family and plight your troth to yourself.

How come no one thought of that before? Why haven’t people been willing to declare to the world how much they love themselves? I do not need to explain how you consummate your self-marriage, but you can guess.

According to Vice.com self-marriage is a way of boosting or affirming your self-love. As though it needs boosting or affirming. No one else might like you, but you like you. No one else might love you, but you love you. No one else might want to sleep with you, but you are happy to shoulder the burden, night after night… you never fail to be there for you.

Think of the advantages. You do not need to worry about changing your name. Some of self-marriage’s proponents argue that you do not have to have sex with the same person all the time. Pardon me for raising the question, but if you have sex with yourself—Woody Allen once called it sex with someone you love—aren’t you having sex with the same body every time? If you hook up with someone at a club, aren’t you therefore cheating on yourself? Console yourself with the thought that once you marry yourself you will not be arguing about who is doing which chores.

Of course, when check in to a hotel should you say that you are one or two? Do you file your taxes as single or married? What if you want to go out but your self wants to stay home?

Proponents of self-marriage say that it’s better than being alone. To make it seem slightly less ridiculous, they say that when you marry yourself you are telling the world that you like your own company. Perfectly independent and autonomous—isn’t that what everyone wants?-- you will not be desperate to find someone to fill the gap in your life.

Proponents also say that it relieves the pressure to find the One, because you are the One. Now when you don’t have a date for Saturday night you really do have a date with yourself. You can pig out on chicken wings and chips and no one will be the wiser. Perfect self-indulgence one might call it.

Then again, what happens when you start talking to yourself? Is it a real conversation or an ersatz psychotic breakdown? We know that in psychiatry talking to yourself is not a very good sign.

But, when you marry yourself, can you still date? Proponents of self-marriage will say that they do not cheat on themselves when they have sex with someone else because they have an open relationship. They have agreed with themselves that extramarital affairs will be fine. Some might call it polygamy.

But, won’t your auxiliary spouses be jealous of your extraordinary love for yourself. And if you are completely self-sufficient and do not need anyone for anything, what is their role? Are they just extra baggage, to be used for subsidiary needs and then tossed aside in favor of the one true love that will never leave you: your Self.

But then again, how can you want yourself, how can you yearn for yourself, how can you desire yourself when there is no way of putting any distance between you and yourself? If absence makes the heart grow fonder, or some such thing, and if absence is the basis for desire—you cannot desire something you already have—it makes no sense to say that you desire yourself, that you will need to seduce yourself, that you will need to charm yourself.

If you are a woman and can figure out parthenogenesis, you can even have children. As for divorce, some believe that the only way you can dissolve this marriage by yourself is by committing suicide.

If you read some of the articles on this strange custom you will discover that its leading practitioners seem all to be women. It’s hard to believe that women are more full of themselves than men, but such seems to be the case. Perhaps, it comes from feminist ideology and the therapy culture. The self-married few see self-marriage as a way to escape patriarchal oppression and commitments to other people.

If we had read this in The Onion, it would be good for a few laughs. Just because we read it on Vice.com does not make it less satirical. Some people seem to want to make themselves a living, breathing reductio ad absurdum of one of the main trends in philosophy and psychology: the glorification of the Self, the obsession with Self, the adoration of Self, the veneration of the Self. How much psychotherapy is devoted to healing the Self, to repairing the Self? Wouldn’t self-marriage be the logical goal of this process?

Of course, the mini-minds of the therapy world will tell you that once you commit yourself to self-love and find a good, clean, healthy self-love you will project your inner radiance and self-confidence. Others will immediately be attracted to you, because nothing is quite so attractive as someone who is full of hiimself. Thus self-love by the theory will naturally lead to fulfilling love with another person.

For those who like their theories pure and who refuse to adulterate their serious thinking with any objective facts or realities, self-marriage is clearly the way to go. For my part I liked it better when pride was a sin.