The Rise of Sologamy: Can You Really Marry Yourself?

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

A single, unattached, childless Carrie leaves this iconic phone message in an episode of Sex in the city after her expensive designer shoes were stolen at a baby shower. It was a way of settling scores; a way of making a face at a system that considered a woman's “traditional” lifestyle choices – a husband and children – to be more serious and important than the “selfish” alternative of remaining single and spending money on shoes. Carrie had no real Her intention was to marry herself; she just wanted her sarcastic friend to shell out the $485 needed to replace a pair of lost Manolos. But it turns out the leading lady we all love to hate was way ahead of her time.

Twenty years later, the practice of marrying oneself, also known as “sologamy” or “autogamy,” seems to have become much more popular, if not entirely common. In June of this year, Rebecca Holberry proudly wrote on Metro about the decision to throw a lavish solo wedding for her 40th birthday after two serious relationships that ultimately failed and five years of being single.

“The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my relationships had brought nothing but disappointment and drama. In fact, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to get married,” she said. “But the dress? The cake? The party? I definitely still wanted that.”

Last autumn, Sarah Wilkinson, a 42-year-old credit controller, also decided to get married after saving for 20 years for the big day that never came. She spent £10,000, wore a white sequinned dress, was walked down the aisle by her mother and made vows to herself (including never giving up control of the TV remote).

“It was a wonderful 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 a point where you think, ‘I might not be able to have this with a partner by my side, but why should I miss out? ’ That money was set aside for my wedding; it was a question of ‘it’s there and why not use it for something I want to do? ’

In 2022, Kshama Bindu caused a national stir when she became the first person in India to practice sologamy, hosting a ceremony that included traditional body art and cleansing rituals associated with Hindu weddings. It sparked controversy at the highest level, with politicians calling it a form of “conscientiousness” bordering on madness and claiming it was against religion.

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

“I felt beautiful, like I won the 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, writer Sophie Tanner, known by her Instagram account “thesologamist,” even wrote a novel inspired by the experience of marrying herself in 2015. To celebrate the release of Reader, I married myself Four years later, they renewed their vows with a flash mob in Brighton.

But is sologamy legal? Can one get divorced? Does marrying oneself preclude marrying another person?

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

This means there is no need to ever divorce, as there is “no legal principle that you have to ask a court to rule on; there are no loose ends in the court system that need to be tied up when it comes to the notion that you are married to yourself,” she adds. This is largely due to the lack of financial complications when you are single. “If you marry someone else in the UK, you automatically have rights to that person’s financial assets, including their estate and pension. If you marry yourself, you only have rights against yourself in financial terms, which makes it a bit absurd from a legal perspective.”

Marry yourself, then, and you will have more than the right to marry someone else in the future, minus the accusations of polygamy.

Despite its lack of legal recognition, the practice has been around for about 30 years. An American woman named Linda Baker is believed to be the first recorded person to officially go solo – she married herself to celebrate her 40th birthday in 1993, in the presence of 75 of her family and friends and with the help of seven bridesmaids. “It’s about doing things for yourself and not waiting for someone else to do it,” she said of her headline-grabbing wedding.

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Critics have derided sologamy as narcissistic, a product of an increasingly individualistic and self-obsessed society. Even when I mentioned the idea at the bar, I was met with dismissive comments and grimaces, as if I had told an unnecessarily rude and tasteless joke. But 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 toward others.

“Marrying yourself has nothing to do with vanity or the pursuit of adoration,” Tanner writes. “Sologamy is about committing to taking responsibility 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 for a greater capacity for human connection.”

It doesn’t have to involve a commitment to remaining single, either. “Through sologamy, I’m saying that self-love is just as important as romantic love, but both can be present in my life,” she adds. “I think it’s an important skill to learn how to be happy on your own. Even when you’re 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 increasing lack of spirituality, despite the vital role ritual plays in defining our identity and fostering our development. Other cultures have coming-of-age ceremonies that act as a gateway to adulthood and independence; in the UK and US, people choose to marry later in life or not at all, “which means they have nothing to mark their personal milestones,” she posits. “A personal wedding offers an opportunity to officially acknowledge a feeling of personal growth.”

This attraction to rituals that we feel as human beings could be the key to the appeal of solo weddings. According to Professor Harvey Whitehouse, professor of social anthropology at Oxford University and author of Heredity: The evolutionary origins of the modern worldThe reason we feel the need to celebrate weddings and funerals “comes down to two types 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, such as dying or getting married, “involve changes in status that need to be marked in certain ways,” she says. “But the specific ways we celebrate weddings and funerals clearly differ from one society to another: these specific traditions are inherited culturally, not biologically. Both forms of inheritance make us want to celebrate weddings and funerals.”

As for adapting the traditional wedding ceremony to suit a single person, there is an anthropological “bonding” incentive that explains the appeal of sologamy in certain societies. If more and more people are choosing to live alone, “that is a lifestyle they may still feel the need to transition into and ritually celebrate,” Whitehouse adds. “To do so, they draw on their evolved psychological heritage, but also on their cultural traditions to find a way to make that transition seem real. And in the process, they are creating bonds with other people who participate in their weddings, as well as creating indirect bonds with an ever-growing subset of sologamous partners.”

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

In fact, sologamy might be the most radical feminist act. “Historically, the success of a marriage depended on a woman’s willingness to subordinate her identity to the good of her husband and children,” Tanner argues. “Today, when a woman marries 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 ‘abandoned. ’”

“She is choosing life; she is choosing herself.”