While You’re At It Marry Yourself

I spent the weekend trying to avoid reading anything about Ireland, or about all those children going missing at the border, or any news of any kind, really. But basically I failed, and the culmination of all my sorrows was smacking once more into the increasingly mainstreamed phenomenon of Self Marriage.* At first it was a clever and provocative activity for upscale western women tired of trying to stuff any gender neutral man into the margins of a carefully considered ethically sourced lifestyle. But now it’s for women everywhere.

Self-commitment ceremonies have been trending off and on for decades, and the term sologamy – marriage by a person to oneself – has recently woven its way into everyday parlance. These days, you can find at-home self-wedding kits with affirmation tips or enrol in spiritual retreats with carefully crafted commitment ceremonies under the supervision of the token guru or shaman. All of this commercialised spirituality is ostensibly part of a growing self-worth movement, considered by many to be a new class of feminist coming-of-age rituals.

Lucky for the author, she got a book deal out of her four month journey to find herself.

It all started when my thirst for some serious soul-searching at the end of a succession of failed romances drove me to get off the dating merry go-round in New York, vacate my apartment in Brooklyn, and wander off deep into the wilderness (as one does). I moved to an ashram in Kerala where I meditated and subjected my body to an Ayurvedic cleanse, worked on a vineyard on Sicily’s Mount Etna and went on a solo-safari in the Selous, Africa’s largest game reserve, a place that is remote, raw and teeming with wildlife. Exactly what I needed.

Gosh, if that’s all it takes, sign me up, minus the cleanse, but certainly for the book contract. Bitter sarcasm aside, as usual, the whole article, and the trend itself, is wholly tragic. The precious, ubiquitous concoction of self-adoration and wandering spirituality, cohered fatuously together with fantastic amounts of cash and entitlement, makes me want to curl up into a ball and give up.

Is this what’s been won by the Irish vote? By a hundred years of feminism? And the flip side of this coin is the tragic birth of that toxic incel ideology. Men sit by, helplessly enraged, blaming everyone, but especially women, for not relieving their porn-addled sexual frustration.

The two sexes, joined together by the dating app and luxuriant immoderate expectation, are set asunder by the tsunami force wave of destructive self-love. They meet up, hurt each other, and retreat, wounded, into their separate corners tweeting cries for help.

Boy, the “while you’re at it love yourself” rings so hollow against the loneliness and heartbreak of a generation of women who have to buy their own rings and their own dresses, pledging to the cosmos their vows to make themselves whole. What a resounding gong, a clanging cymbal for all the men sitting alone with their phones and their despair, heaping up hopelessness for the days to come. And if any one of them thinks of expressing his masculinity, whatever that even is any more, he will be hushed, admonished to push his woke-book filled tote bag out of the way and concentrate on his glass of white wine. If he weeps, it will be to his good.

If only there were some way for the two to be loved by some outside cosmic force, some being beyond that could heal and bind up, forgive and restore.

But rather than turning to God, who is the only one who can satisfy the deepest and most fundamental need for love, perhaps we can find someone to blame for total societal collapse. Someone besides ourselves. Adam? Feminism? Capitalism? Is there anyone anywhere who could take responsibility?

I guess not. Now, I wonder where all those children on the border went?

*#lowhangingfruit #endlessblogfodder