While we’re sitting around refreshing our newsfeed waiting for a block of stories to get beyond the point of endless speculation, we were fishing around through email and found that there was one day this week when the word of the day was ‘sologamy.’ Our Staff is old so their minds did a flashback to the 2003 episode of Sex and the City, “A Woman’s Right to Shoes”, in which Carrie married herself purely to get a pair of expensive footwear as a wedding present. Then we wondered why the hell ‘sologamy’ would be popping up now in 2025. Could this be a retro sort of thing? Are they making another Sex and the City movie (please, no)?
As it turns out, sologamy is having a boom of sorts, especially in the UK. In the US there’s even a website (of course) that offers you everything you need for your self wedding. At the top of the website’s front page, it says, “You Are Reason To Celebrate.
“A roadmap to positivity, our I Married Me kit has all you need to create your own ceremony, including a self-wedding ring, vows, and daily affirmation cards.
“A self-wedding is a symbolic ceremony–about reconnecting and staying connected with you. Wear the ring to remind you every day to LOVE YOURSELF.“
Self-wedding kits run from $25, including a ring that will likely turn your finger green by the end of your ‘honeymoon,’ to $440 for a kit that includes an alleged 14k gold ring (white or yellow). You can also just buy the T-shirt for $25, which might be the better investment.
On the one hand, we’re not surprised. We’ve known plenty of people who’ve made arrangements with a close friend saying, “If I’m not married by the time I’m X age (usually between 40 and 50), we’ll just marry each other so we can have a wedding.” We’re not sure we know anyone who actually followed through on that and the marriage survived, but we understand the angst one might have to be facing the prospect of entering one’s declining years alone.
On the other hand, there are just sooooo many questions. For example, what if you marry yourself and end up not liking you? Believe it or not, that has happened. Eighteen months ago a Brazilian social media influencer, Suellen Carey, told her 400,000 Instagram followers: “I am sologamous. Today I value and love myself, I married myself here in London. This is one of the happiest days of my life.” But she soon found her new married state too lonely. She tried 10 sessions of couples therapy, but in the end, her sologamy ended in divorce. “I realized that my sologamous marriage was a process of healing and self-discovery,” she told the Mirror. “Personal growth can lead us in different directions. I’ve decided that now is the time to open my heart to new possibilities, including the chance to find a partner.”
We’ve other questions not so easily answered. What if you have Multiple Personality Disorder but don’t like all the personalities? Can you marry part of yourself and not others or do you have to marry the whole thing? Should you have premarital counseling? (We would definitely recommend therapy of some sort.) Is this even legal? Well, it’s not illegal.
The whole concept seems to be spreading. Even Indian women are now having a Hindu ceremony with body art, opulent jewels, and cleansing rituals. We’re wondering if the bride’s father still had to pay for the whole thing.
There are a few benefits. You don’t need a prenup. You don’t have to file for divorce and split your belongings with yourself. You can go wherever you want on your honeymoon, though getting the honeymoon suite at the hotel might be a stretch. Should you meet someone you actually do like (which happens) you don’t have to tell them that you’re already married.
We wondered if this was just a ‘chic’ thing. Have any self-centered dudes gotten married to themselves? After all, we’ve met plenty of guys who seem to fit the personality type. We found one, and he was doing it simply for the comedy of the whole thing. A hypnotherapist named Heron Saline held a ceremony with close friends in upstate Minnesota (where no one was looking). His account goes as follows:
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.”
The 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.”
If you’re still skeptical and thinking sologamy is just another word for giving up, you’re not alone. Religious leaders around the world have deemed the practice blasphemous. Something tells us, however, that people who marry themselves aren’t exactly worried about getting kicked out of the church as much as they are getting kicked out of their favorite nightclub.
One thing about it, if one marries themself, it’s unlikely to be a shotgun wedding.
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