Happily-ever after: Self-marriage,the claim of wellness,and temporal ownership

Abstract

The phenomenon commonly described as self-marriage is an exponentially growing trend in which individuals, mostly women, marry themselves. Drawing on a textual analysis of self-marriage accounts in online media, we argue that this concept denotes a new form of self-love and self-commitment – at the heart of which lies a wellness program, rather than a legal contract. This article explores this emergent concept, focusing on a notable, though not exclusive, segment of its practitioners: single women. We analyze the discursive formations and narrative formulas through which self-marriage travels and consolidates in the digital world. We explore this performative act in temporal terms: we introduce the concept of temporal ownership, to explain how self-marriage offers single women a venue by which they can claim to take control over their present and future, and reposition themselves vis-a-vis heteronormative timelines. Our account of temporal ownership is threefold. We analyze self-marriage as a declaration about ‘non-waiting’, and the creation of a ‘present continuous temporality’; as an act of ‘moving forward’, a meaningful milestone heralding a new beginning; and, finally, as a commitment to lifelong self-love. This threefold discussion leads us to a broader contribution to the sociological literature. In particular, we use self-marriage as a case study with which to flesh out the utility of thinking about wellness culture and certain aspects of neoliberalism through a temporal lens.

Keywords

neoliberalism single women temporality time wellness

Introduction

In the spring of 2016, 36-year-old Erica Anderson, a single New Yorker, decided to outwardly celebrate the love of her life – herself (Pesta, 2016). On her apartment’s rooftop, and before an intimate cluster of close friends, Anderson exchanged vows with herself, so to speak; she married herself. Erica’s self-marriage ceremony garnered extensive media attention locally and globally. In an ABC news item reporting the first anniversary of Anderson’s self-marriage, she recounted how illuminating and life-changing the event had been for her (Davis et al., 2017).

Anderson is not alone in standing on her own at her wedding. Over the last two decades, self-marriage has emerged in the digital world as a visible and increasingly growing concept. Leading media outlets have pored over the phenomenon; it has featured in prime-time television shows like Glee and Sex and the City, and has been the subject of TED talks. These mediated self-marriage representations generally describe an event, a ritual or an experience, in and through which individuals, mostly women, mark their profound, lifelong commitment to themselves. This article explores this emergent concept, focusing on its discursive formations and narrative formulas as it travels and consolidates in the digital world.

Self-marriage comes in many forms. One can marry oneself in public, in a townhouse, urban park or community center; or in private, at home, in front of one’s mirror. One can hire a self-marriage coach; purchase a DIY ‘I Marry Me’ kit;¹ or design one’s wedding independently. One can marry oneself in a format similar to a mass ritual; or one can perform the ceremony in a more intimate setting. And, finally, while most self-married individuals are women, there are men who have opted to marry themselves; and while most self-married women are single, there are some women who, alongside marriage to someone else, added self-marriage.

Beyond and beneath these and other important differences, self-marriage in all of its instantiations is a performative act, with no implications with regard to a legal binding. As opposed to a dyadic marriage (whether in the heterosexual or same-sex context), self-marriage does not carry any consequences in terms of legal status or institutional recognition. Instead, as we will show, self-marriage is a new form of self-love and self-commitment – at the heart of which lies a wellness program, rather than a legal contract.

Some social commentators have ridiculed self-marriage, suggesting that it is a narcissistic and bizarre expression of self-centered culture (e.g., Weisman, 2017). True, few of us have attended such a wedding; and to be frank, many people would struggle to stifle a smile in response to this description. And yet, it seems too easy to dismiss offhand these newly invented rituals as bizarre, eccentric or amusing. Instead, by attending closely to the meanings assigned to self-marriage by self-marriage brides, gurus and entrepreneurs in the digital sphere – where this concept is given life – we seek to raise pertinent questions about its nature as a profound self-making event. In particular we aim to illuminate self-marriage among its main practitioners: single women. We ask, what has made self-marriage an appealing choice to growing numbers of single women today, and what are the cultural sources and resources that help constitute self-marriage as such.

Drawing on a textual analysis of digital representations of self-marriage, we argue that self-marriage offers its practitioners effective cultural scripts to engage positively with their selves, and in particular the wellness of their selves. The framework of well-being emerged inductively from our study. While we initially framed the analysis of self-marriage mainly in terms of the changing landscape of intimacy, and a feminist critique of marriage as a patriarchal institution, we learned that these issues, albeit key to interpreting the rise of self-marriage, are themselves tied to pervasive dictates of wellness.

We develop our understanding of self-marriage as an expression of wellness culture by drawing on temporal lenses. We argue that self-marriage relies on neoliberal and wellness ideologies, specifically their underpinning orientations to time. We find this temporal lens particularly productive because it allows us to capture the key schemes that underwrite the significant personal meaning that is assigned to self-marriage. As we will demonstrate, mediated accounts of self-marriage are deeply informed by temporal logics, some running against the prevailing stigmatizing approaches of late singlehood (see for example, Budgeon, 2008, 2016; DePaulo, 2007; Kislev, 2019; Lahad, 2017; Simpson, 2006) and, more broadly, dominant heteronormative temporal schemes.

We propose the concept of temporal ownership to explain these new scripts. By this, we mean an assertive claim to take control of temporal perceptions of self-making. Our account of temporal ownership is threefold. First, while belated singlehood is often understood as revolving around the wait for fulfilling couplehood, self-marriage is a declaration of release from this temporal position. Self-marriage is narrated as a significant validation of the extant self and the extant present; as an insistence on a ‘present continuous temporality’. Secondly, self-marriage is constructed as an act of moving forward, and as a new beginning. Thirdly, self-marriage is construed as an assertion of a lifelong commitment to prioritize and care for one’s beloved self. Drawing on the power of material artifacts and marked anniversaries, self-married women embed the new life with both mundane and annual reminders of this lifelong commitment. The value of the temporal lens extends beyond emerging formations of self-marriage. In particular, as will become clear in the discussion, we propose self-marriage as a case study which demonstrates the utility of thinking in temporal terms about wellness culture and certain aspects of neoliberalism.

We find textual, digital materials to be conducive to the kind of analysis we offer here for two main reasons. First, empirically-wise, the digital sphere is where self-marriage is situated, and where it has gained a steady presence as a social category. Between 2012 and 2019, the self-marriage phenomenon has been extensively covered, both in established outlets such as The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Washington Post and the BBC, and in popular media outlets, online magazines and portals like Flare, Vice, Vogue and Huffington Post. Following the tradition of cultural studies scholarship (Fiske, 1986; Hall, 1973), we see these digital accounts as a key site where self-marriage scripts are produced, disseminated and consumed. Put differently, textual digital materials are organic to the very phenomenon we attempt to unpack in this article.

Secondly, the pervasive mediated accounts tend to elaborate on the life course and broader biographical context in which self-marriage is embedded. The often lengthy and personalized – and sometimes confessional – descriptions can be understood as anchored in the flourishing of intimate publics (Berlant, 2008), including digital ones (Dobson et al., 2018); or in the fact that self-marriage is considered a curious event, one that calls for narrative explanations and justifications. In any event, the extant textual, digital representations lend themselves to detailed and diachronic perspectives on the life course of self-married individuals, thus inviting us to assess the temporal orientations and navigations entailed in and produced by self-marriage.

Even though a Google search yielded 210,000 results for search terms aligned to self-marriage (February 2019), the data for this article are based on a considerably smaller number of texts – more than 100 media representations of self-marriage, drawing on accounts of self-married women, together with a range of commercialized texts produced by self-marriage entrepreneurs. This is because at this early stage of the scholarly analysis of self-marriage, we wish to pay attention to the serious and significant aspects of this phenomenon. Texts criticizing and mocking self-marriage warrant attention in their own right, and for this reason are not included in this article.

Our choice of search terms followed a long process of exploring various internet materials pertaining to self-marriage. We finally worked with the most widely-used terms in media culture, which include ‘self-marriage’, ‘sologomy’, ‘married herself’ and ‘self-marriage ritual’. These terms were fed into the Google search engine, encompassing news, images, videos and blogs. We also used the search engines embedded within news sites, online magazines and portals. Searches were conducted on a weekly basis throughout 2017 and 2018. The texts analyzed were all published in English.

This article is the first scholarly account of self-marriage. As such, it focuses on the primary demographic among self-marriage practitioners: single women (although we believe that our insights on self-marriage as a wellness program apply equally to married women and men). Likewise, we are fully aware that neither the intersection of wellness and temporality nor the textual methodology that backs this prism provides exclusive vistas onto the compelling social category of self-marriage. Questions about the position of self-marriage within the shifting landscape of couplehood contracts, or about the consumerist processes underlying the creation of a commodified self – to mention two immediate directions of inquiry – may be just as relevant. Likewise, open interviews with key players as well as participant-observations of self-marriage events can certainly open up future research prospects about the lived experience and social structure of this phenomenon, which we will not attend to in this article. In what follows, we situate our account within what we find as the pertinent conceptual framework for our account: the intersection between wellness and temporality.

Theoretical framework: Self-marriage, wellness and temporality

Over the last few decades, the tropes of ‘well-being’ and ‘wellness’ have become increasingly prominent in public discourse. Directed towards improving one’s well-being, this overarching discourse travels across various social spheres, ranging from corporate culture to new age and self-help guides (Cedarström & Spicer, 2015; Sharma, 2014; Shome, 2014). More specifically, the idea of wellness has been commodified; it is annexed to a variety of neoliberal governmental goals, from increasing sales of holistic health practices to optimizing worker productivity (Sharma, 2014). In this orientation, the neoliberal subject is nudged into taking complete self-responsibility for constant self-improvement and loving one’s inner self (Hazleden, 2003; Rose, 1998).

This public culture of wellness is steeped in capitalist and neoliberal values, and is linked to notions of reflexivity, ongoing investment in the care of the self, and the individual pursuit of both happiness and contentment (Cedarström & Spicer, 2015; Sointu, 2012). In this context, Cedarström and Spicer have contended that living well has become a moral imperative, one capable of improving one’s personal market value. Inevitably, this cultural sacralization of wellness has created a ‘duty’ of happiness (Ahmed, 2010) and a ‘tyranny of cheerfulness’ (King, 2006). Moreover, Shome (2014) points out that the inner wellness trend ethos tends to be represented by middle- and upper-middle-class white women, and has thus come to signify new formations of white femininity.

At the center of this enterprise stands the (mostly white) female subject, obliged to cultivate oneself towards the optimal realization of one’s potential. In this context, self-marriage, with its accentuated emphasis on self-love, can be interpreted as part of a growing preoccupation with the empowered upper-middle-class woman (see for example, Gill & Elias, 2014; Gill & Scharff, 2013; Shome, 2014). Self-marriage is embedded within the eclecticism of therapeutic language, one that interchangeably employs notions of wellness, happiness, fulfillment, and the realization of one’s potential.

But studying self-marriage allows us to do more than investigate one underexplored instantiation of these therapeutic and neoliberal trends of wellness. More importantly, it allows us to conduct a temporal analysis of the neoliberal pursuit of wellness. The temporal perspective is central to our analysis of self-marriage, and wellness culture more broadly, because self-marriage accounts show that the validation of a self-contained self is intertwined with a new orientation to time. We contend that, by drawing on wellness enterprise (Sharma, 2014), the emerging practice of self-marriage creates a new temporal script. This script prescribes the full presence of the present, while designating an optimistic advance towards the lifelong commitment to a self-sustained self. We suggest that the temporal lens used here in the context of self-marriage can be productively deployed across the wide array of contexts in which individuals are treated, and articulate themselves, as neoliberal subjects working towards self-fulfillment.

In foregrounding the links between temporality and the enterprise of wellness, we build on scholarly works that have provided important insights into the workings of time in contemporary regimentations of individuals and collectives (Beynon-Jones & Grabham, 2019; Halberstam, 2005; Lahad, 2017; Sharma, 2014). A number of works, either explicitly or implicitly, draw indicative links between temporality and the well-being of individuals. For example, in her work on dieting temporalities in Weight Watchers online websites, Rebecca Coleman pointed out that the achievement of a healthy diet is done through careful monitoring and tracking of the progress of weight loss. One temporal effect of this achievement is extending ‘the horizon of planning, and thus defining the future as realistic’ (2010, p. 273).

In his account of public health policy in Denmark, Henrik Mikkelsen explicated the demands placed by state agents on elderly citizens to live well and happily, and thus fulfil their ‘potential’. To the degree that the neoliberal imperative construes the individual as an inherently unfolding and self-optimizing subject, even the aging individual should understand that it is ‘never too late for pleasure’ (Mikkelsen, 2017). Relatedly, Jie Yang showed how in China, state-endorsed happiness and self-cultivation campaigns urge citizens – mostly the marginalized poor – to ‘move forward’, by forgetting the misery of the past, creating a fulfilling present, and looking forward to a potentially happy future (Yang, 2013). As neoliberal temporalities urge individuals to maximize their choices (Benton et al., 2017) – making the most out of time (Dolan & Rajak, 2018) – failure to realize the neoliberal promise of moving forward leads to the sense of stuckness in an impossible, unrewarding present (Mains, 2007; Yian, 2004).

Present continuous: The formation of a non-waiting self

You don’t need to spend your life waiting for the one. You’re the one. (Tanner, 2017)

When women describe the unconventional decision to marry themselves, they often employ the notion of self-sufficiency. Articulations of self-sufficiency reverberate throughout accounts of self-marriage: from the explanation that self-marriage ‘means that we are enough, even if we are not partnered with someone else’ (Lakana, 2017); through the therapeutically-hued assertion that self-marriage can be ‘a final step in making [oneself] whole’ (Lewin, 2017); to the first-person confession that self-marriage is ‘a completion of all the work that I’ve been doing on myself . . . I feel more whole, definitely, more complete and I’m not looking outside of myself for happiness’ (Coconuts Bali, 2017).

Statements about a self ‘lost and found’, of happiness searched for and located internally, are entwined with a temporal statement about non-waiting for ‘the one and only’. This statement can be understood within the emerging feminist discourse regarding the ‘new singleton’, the independent woman who refuses to apologize for being single. Indeed, self-marriage provides a counter-script to the cliché of the belated single woman – immersed in an unfulfilled present, waiting for a brighter, happier future contingent on couplehood. The insistence on non-waiting can be seen as a ‘work of the present’ (Kravel-Tovi & Bilu, 2008), or as a claim of a ‘right now!’ temporality (see Coleman, 2011). This temporal position creates what we understand as a present continuous temporality – a temporal position that draws the self-married woman inward, to search and find the extant full self in the here and now.

Take the account of Laura Mesi, an Italian personal trainer, who explained her decision to marry herself by observing that she ‘had waited long enough for Mr. Right’ (Waters, 2018). Or the accounts circulating in public media regarding Linda Barker, an American woman who is often referred to as the first woman marrying herself, in 1993 in a Santa Monica bar. The LA Times quoted Linda as saying that, tired of waiting, she decided to position herself in the driver’s seat. ‘It’s about doing things for yourself and not waiting around for someone else to make it happen’ (Ward-Beiderman, 1993).

After conducting a self-marriage ritual with other single friends, Canadian Alexandra Gill initiated Marry Yourself Vancouver, a self-wedding planning business. Gill declared: ‘You’re the one constant. Your parents will die, your children will grow up and your friends will move, but you’re always there. My commitment to myself simply means that I’m not waiting for someone else to fulfill me and there’s no other half I need to get on with my life.’ Replicating what we observe as a salient self-marriage trope associated with the non-waiting assertion, Gill added: ‘I’m not looking for The One; I am The One’ (Treleaven, 2018).

To better understand the power of these articulations, we need to appreciate how they run against the powerful stereotype of the desperately waiting single woman. The single woman is often portrayed as possessing a ‘spoiled identity’ (Byrne, 2000) or ‘deficit identity’ (Reynolds, 2008), stigmatized portrayals that, according to Lahad (2017), are intimately linked with her assigned position of waiting and wasting her time. Accordingly, she is living ‘on hold’: the complaisant bystander, the onlooker in her peer group’s wedding celebrations. Watching how others progress in their life trajectories, actualizing the scripts connecting adulthood with family life, the single woman is seen as trapped, by her waiting (Lahad, 2017).

Within the field of what can now be termed as ‘waiting studies’, scholars have explored how waiting haunts the present (Broom et al., 2017); a process whose effects are intrinsically linked with alienation, uncertainty and the submission to power (Ayeuro, 2010; Bourdieu, 2000; Lahad, 2017; Vitus, 2010). We suggest that self-marriage is sometimes a counter-response to a temporal dynamic of submission to hegemonic heteronormative forces.

Sophie, a 38-year-old British single woman who married herself in 2015, described her resistance to wasting more time on unproductive waiting. Offering a disenchanted perspective on the ideals of coupledom, she called attention to the already present self as a valid, effective source of empowerment. According to Sophie: ‘You can be more lonely in a relationship that’s not functioning than just being on your own, and a lot of people don’t realize that. She explained further: You can waste your life waiting for the one, when you are the one yourself’ (Lytton, 2017). Echoing this notion, Laura Mesi, mentioned earlier, similarly asserted: ‘I firmly believe that each of us must first of all love ourselves’ (Waters, 2018).

Unsurprisingly, self-marriage gurus and entrepreneurs have identified the economic potential of the intersected ideas of non-waiting and self-love in the growing market of self-marriage. Hence, these ideas have become increasingly commercialized within a developing industry that speaks the language of immanent – and potentially imminent – wellness. The industry includes DIY ‘self-wedding in a box’ kits, self-marriage coaching services, and self-marriage counseling. For instance, selfmarriageceremonies.com , which offers a 10-week self-study program, affirms: ‘It is time. Time to fully live your one wild and precious life. Time to untie the stories, distractions and illusions that keep you small and lean into the life that is waiting for you. Time to live what you long for. Time to honor your innermost values. Time to forgive yourself and be gentle with your innocent heart. Time to stand firmly in what you know to be true and make a bold, lifelong commitment to love . . . We are the ones we’ve been waiting for’. Speaking for itself, this description infuses self-marriage with notions of well-being, as well as with alternative temporalities which defy conventional, heteronormative, linear, reproductive schedules (see, relatedly, Dinshaw et al., 2007; Halberstam, 2005).

Moving forward: Self-marriage as a new beginning

After years of exploring different theories on how to understand myself, self-marriage felt right. (McCrum, 2016)

The mediated digital representations of self-marriage present it as an event setting up a new biographical trajectory. In particular, self-marriage is constructed as an act of moving forward – an act that holds the promise, or at least the potential, of a new beginning. Age often plays a formative role in this construction. While there is no single fixed age invoked by self-married brides as the ‘right time’, our textual analysis suggests that the decision is informed, at least in part, by age-related calculations and expectations.

For some, age constituted a predetermined, ultimate deadline that, if not met within the normative couplehood timeline, would be responded to by self-marriage. For others, a certain age carried a symbolic weight, played out through personal or family biography. Such was the case with Jennifer Hoes, who married herself at the age her father was when he died, after deciding ‘not to stay in the shade of his death at thirty’ (Zipser, 2006). As a key component in the construal of self-marriage as a turning point, age is associated with a logic of countdown. As we will see below, it becomes a point of departure for a count up towards a new and better future.

In an interview with ABC News, Yasmin, an American self-married woman from Houston, recounted: ‘I’d be saying for a few years that if I hadn’t gotten married by the time I was 40, I’d just have a wedding by myself’ (Tan, 2015). Another example, Chen, a single woman from Taipei, was described by Reuters as having ‘[looked] forward to turning 30 since she was a teenager’. In Chen’s own words, ‘Age thirty is a prime period for me. My work and experience are in good shape, but I haven’t found a partner, so what can I do?’ (Jennings, 2010).

Interestingly, these accounts are all underpinned by a non-apologetic stance on age and aging. Given that middle age and old age are considered as a tragic fall (Gullette, 2004), belated female singlehood is commonly linked with accelerated aging, which stands for a gradual loss of temporal agency (Lahad, 2017).

The emphasis that self-married women place on age-related considerations is only logical. What is intriguing about how these women position themselves vis-a-vis the heteronormative social scripts is the fact that, while adhering to them, they also write them anew. On the one hand, the timing of the self-marriage does echo gendered life schedules. But on the other, they succeed in defying these very conventions, by not having a groom. As they approach the marriage ‘deadline’ age, they inevitably engage with a countdown logic and the idea that time is running out. And yet, self-marriage brides strip this logic of its most basic feature, by turning this unmet deadline into a celebration of the self. In so doing, they flip the hegemonic temporal script of singlehood and aging, and once again exercise temporal ownership.

Across various social spheres, countdown works as a temporal mechanism that demarcates time. It can range from celebratory anticipation (e.g., New Year’s Eve) to anxious calculations at times of perceived crisis (Kravel-Tovi, 2017; Muehlmann, 2012). In the aforementioned self-marriage reflections, countdown emerges as neither a sign of failure nor as a marker of lost time, the noxious connotations of belated singlehood (Lahad, 2014, 2017). Rather, it is a point of departure for a new beginning.

This formation of a new beginning is not always grounded in age and a preceding countdown. Sometimes, self-marriage is the result of intensive reflexive and entrepreneurial work on, and of, the self. This kind of work, as mentioned earlier, is key to the neoliberal moral imperative to grow out of crises and even redeem one’s self.

Sophie, the self-married bride mentioned above, recalled: ‘I was lying in bed recovering from a really bad break-up and flu and had that horrible feeling of crying every day. Lying in bed, I was thinking “it’ll be so great start to feeling happy again and just have myself back”. I felt my normal optimism coming back and started thinking that I actually hadn’t lost anything: I’m happy with my life, I’m really grateful for all my friends, I loved my life and myself. I wish there was a way of celebrating it’ (Brazell, 2018). Reflecting on her successful struggle with a momentous life crisis, Sophie’s words underline how self-marriage helped her to rescue herself and start afresh.

Temporal reminders for lifelong commitment

You are going to marry yourself for richer and for poorer . . . You are going to do this until death make you part. (McMillan, 2016)

Falling in love with the self is not enough. The commitment needs to be performed in a meaningful way, and it also needs to be worked out in a (presumably) lifelong commitment. The notion of lifelong commitment features ubiquitously in self-marriage narratives. It conveys the basic idea that even if the self-married woman should marry or enter a significant romantic relationship – with another – later in life, her commitment to herself will not be compromised. Self-marriage, it becomes clear, is not a momentary station on the path to redemptive couplehood, but offers a new and individual-centered version of the ‘happily-ever-after’.

In the telling words of Grace Gelder from the UK, self-marriage is ‘about making this pact or promise to yourself and then somehow enacting that in how you live your life from that day on’ (Cunard, 2014). This articulation, similar to those found in other self-marriage mediated narratives, is grounded in two powerful temporal schemes. The first, obviously, is the ideal of lifelong conjugal commitment; the second is the discursive alliance between neoliberalism and therapeutic culture, endlessly exhorting people to work on the self (Scharff, 2016; Shoshana, 2014). This is why self-married women do not make do with either a ‘present continuous’ happiness in the here and now, or the alluring ‘moving forward’ narrative of a new beginning. In order to substantialize wellness in their life, they also formulate a lifelong contract to prioritize their beloved self. Next, we will demonstrate how this lifelong contract adds another layer to the temporal ownership exercised by self-married women.

Unsurprisingly, the temporal scheme of lifelong commitment is brought to life, in ritualized form, by the self-marriage event, usually in the explicit words of the marital vow. Dominique Youkhehpaz, an American self-marriage guru who married herself on her 22nd birthday, promised ‘to be kind and compassionate to herself’ (Cunard, 2014); Nadine Schweigert, a 36-year-old American, promised ‘to enjoy inhabiting my own life and to relish a lifelong love affair with my beautiful self’ (Kelly, 2012). The promise that women bind themselves to is, in essence, to nourish one’s self ‘in good times and bad’, and to do so in a tangible and regular manner.

Self-marriage vows often specify the everyday as the temporal site within which the lifelong contract to love one’s self would and should be actualized. As one bride, Sasha Frolova, declared in her ceremony: ‘I vow to love myself, every day, and never fear that this may be misconstrued as vanity’ (Schneier, 2018). Similarly, Dominique Youkhehpaz led a mass ritual at the Burning Man Festival in Nevada, in which some 100 women said their vows in front of a mirror, each promising herself to ‘never leave [herself]’, to ‘look in the mirror every day and be grateful’, and ‘to give [one’s self] the incredible life that [she] longs for’.²

Everyday life is conducive to sustaining the lifelong self-marriage contract because it is dotted with temporal reminders that revive the memory of the self-marriage event, reinforcing its value as a turning point and, ultimately, underlining the value of enduring vow. The increasingly commercialized aspect of self-marriage is particularly effective in imprinting this enduring vow onto the everyday, as it helps cast the bride’s words into artifacts, objects and fabrics. As studies about material culture demonstrate, objects and artifacts carry with them a certain temporality. They might, for example, index past experiences, arouse memories, trigger nostalgia, or fashion dispositions towards the present and the future (Bryant, 2014; Kravel-Tovi, 2018). In the context under discussion here, the objects associated with the vows materialize the commitment to the self, and re-present the eventful occasion in the daily life of the bride.

Some women describe how wearing their rings reminds them of their self-commitment; it mobilizes them, each time anew, into totalizing this commitment. For Jennifer Hoes (Zipser, 2006), who has celebrated her ninth anniversary of her self-marriage, this materialized reminder works quite straightforwardly. She just needs to read the vow engraved on her ring: ‘I will return to my heart every time’. She reads this vow every day. Sasha Cagen shared how ‘every time she twirls the ring on her finger, she thinks about her commitment to be good to herself’. Arguing that she’ll never be able to divorce herself, she explained further: ‘Any marriage takes work. Obviously, it’s a journey that you go on with yourself, but you have these vows and promises to yourself that are very grounding. I think the biggest difference for me is the ring or engagement necklace that I put on, and every time I doubt myself it really calms or centers me’ (Ewens, 2016). Dominique Youkhehpaz, now a self-marriage guru, decided to have a nose ring; this enables her to ‘breathe [her] vows every day’ (Taylor, 2018).

While the vows can provide daily reminders, anniversaries may present annual opportunities for the self-married woman to celebrate self-commitment in a dedicated form. Some brides go traveling; others throw an anniversary party or undertake a charitable endeavor. Either way, they take and make the time to ritualize an annual moment, dedicated to reviving their ‘new beginning’ and punctuating their new trajectory. For Jen W., the very act of self-marriage means the creation of a ‘day of her own’: ‘I was married on 12/31/13 and knowing that that day (which has always had negative associations for me) is now *mine* is really amazing. It’s my anniversary.’ By appropriating New Year’s Eve, bestowing what she conceptualizes as personal empowerment onto this auspicious date, Jen W. created a cyclic culmination to which she claims ownership. Some brides renew their vows on particularly high-profile anniversaries (such as decennial anniversaries), so as to galvanize their self-commitment.

In their analysis of vow renewal rituals, Baxter and Braithwaite (2002) suggested that marriage anniversaries give couples the opportunity to publicly exhibit the successful choices that resulted in long-term marriage. From a temporal angle, we view the adoption of this ritualistic template by the self-married bride as an opportunity to display the accumulation of time. In opposition to the prevailing assumption that single women are running out of time (Lahad, 2017), stating one’s anniversary thus endows these women with a positive accumulation of time, a significant marker of ‘count up’.

When self-married women use vows and anniversaries as temporal reminders, they adopt highly institutionalized mechanisms available to couples. By so doing, they adopt the linear logic and positive value of accumulated time so intimately associated with conjugal partnership. Indeed, temporal accumulative dimensions play a formative role in the social construction of monogamous relations (Lahad, 2017). From this perspective, long-term conjugal relationships represent a publicly respected achievement. These relations signify time invested wisely and productively. As Kinneret Lahad demonstrates, single women are scorned for wasting their time, and are subjected to the gendered pressure to watchfully guard their time. It can be argued that self-married women draw on the rationale of anniversaries to negotiate these regulatory gendered expectations to accumulate the time that they claim to be valuable.

Discussion

This article is not merely the first serious scholarly effort to study self-marriage, it is also a proposal for self-marriage be taken seriously. On the surface, self-marriage may present as a bizarre and peculiar phenomenon, one that may prompt raised eyebrows and half smiles. Indeed, as noted in the introduction, one prominent aspect of the media coverage of self-marriage is the smirking commentator ridiculing and criticizing this emerging trend. Here, we envisage self-marriage as a rich and thick social category of self-love and self-validation. The powerful appeal that self-marriage bears for women lies in its reliance on the moralized, taken-for-granted aspects of the neoliberal and therapeutic ethics surrounding the self. These ethics are vastly mainstreamed across a variety of arenas and contexts, and have a clear gendered aspect – as is evident in, for example, the movement to love one’s body, or assertions of women’s empowerment (Elias & Gill, 2018). In any event, not only is the neoliberal self encouraged to choose wellness – it is one’s moral duty and responsibility. Thus, striving towards wellness is a recognizable and respectable attribute subsequently transformed to social capital. Self-married brides did not invent these ideas; they have only stretched them to a relatively radical, still emerging form.

The main concern – and contribution – of this article revolves around the temporal component underlying this self-love and, more generally, the neoliberal and therapeutic logic of wellness. We show that, in order to be able to make a claim about being a full and fulfilled self as a single woman, the self-marriage bride finds a way of stepping off the temporal conveyor belt, pointing towards the inevitable narrative resolution of coupledom that normative scripts place them on. We suggest that the public culture of wellness is underwritten by temporal understandings of wellness, and how and when women should strive towards it. In what follows, we discuss what we can gain from using this temporal perspective for elucidating both self-marriage and the broader public enterprise of wellness.

Scholarship on temporality has extensively theorized the workings of time as a key mechanism for the creation of social order, meaning and orientation in the world (Beynon-Jones & Grabham, 2019; Dolan & Rajak, 2018; Elias, 1992; Halberstam, 2005; Mains, 2007; Zerubavel, 1981). Through the social construction of temporal maps and schedules, collectives render the abstract flow of time into standardized and synchronized – that is, manageable and purposeful – charts. Building on these by-now canonical insights, our temporal analysis of self-marriage illuminates how, by engaging with this ritual of self-love, single women imagine themselves anew within the otherwise order-less, empty time of belated singlehood (Lahad, 2017).

This framework is populated by a viable present, alongside a happy-ever-after future trajectory or potential. The self-marriage bride fills the present by her own presence, and engages in a positive ‘count up’ of anniversaries, marking the accumulated passage of time. She celebrates her healthy relationship with one’s self, while simultaneously flipping anxious scripts of accelerated aging (Lahad, 2017). And, finally, she creates reminders of her achieved turning point, and holds on to a lifelong scheme of commitment to the self. By forming her own temporal references, she creates a unique response to the ticking of the social clocks that urge the single woman to enter into matrimony. Altogether, these alternative temporally-related practices and meanings constitute a counter-discourse to heteronormative and reproductive timetables. These practices challenge, in a new manner, the hegemonic couple-culture (Budgeon, 2008), and open up a public conversation about an antithetical course of happiness and wellness.

When we look at how self-married women make and mark time, we can appreciate how they remake their self. Obviously, self-married women draw on other cultural sources as well. They draw, among other forces, on the seductive power of commercialized weddings, the logic of new age philosophies, and the promises of therapeutic culture. But they undoubtedly draw significantly on the power of the aforementioned temporal mechanisms, as anchors of self-making.

To flesh out the broader utility of the temporal lens in the sociological study of wellness, consider, for example, the neoliberal and therapeutic imperative to feel well – or, to be precise, to work on feeling well – at the present time. Wellness culture has no patience; it is not inflicted by procrastination. On the contrary, the duty to pursue well-being (in both psychic and bodily life) is framed by an imminent, sometimes even urgent, horizon. For example, we are consistently prompted, arguably to an excessive degree, to exercise, engage in healthy nourishment, keep a proper work–life balance, love one’s body, and commit to therapy (Elias & Gill, 2018; Sharma, 2014). As the self is construed as the most cherished resource in one’s life, it is up to the individual to start optimizing his or her potential without delay. In other words, the possibility and feasibility of pursuing wellness lies immediately in the here and now – or at least in the very near, imminent future.

One can also take note of how wellness culture advocates transformative, even epiphanic, self-revelations. Such a call is linked with redemptive schemes of ‘before’ and ‘after’ (e.g., ‘before one began to practice Yoga regularly’, or ‘after one started to reclaim “Me” time’). Essentially, this call is receptive to the allure of the ‘new beginning’ – the notion that one can move forward and leave the ‘old self’ behind. Striving towards wellness is a lifelong dictate, the reassuring promise of the ‘happily-ever-after’ script. The temporal perspective allows us to further unpack the dictate to immediately work on the self and to maintain it throughout life. It also allows us to recognize the ways in which various wellness practices are organized around the imperative to imbue the present or the near future with empowering qualities that, if invested imminently and purposefully, will better one’s life. And, finally, it gives us perspective on how the neoliberal self is made and remade daily, and how the taxing call to pursue and actualize wellness has no expiration date. Self-love and wellness are key components in the creation of a potentially fulfilling present; but it is also a lifelong marathon.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We acknowledge equal contribution to this article. We would like to thank Vanessa May and Adam Klin Oron for thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this article. Likewise, we thank the three anonymous readers and editors of The Sociological Review for close reading and particularly helpful suggestions that helped us improve this manuscript. Finally, this article benefited from the careful and much appreciated work of Shvat Eilat on the reference list, as well as from Akin Ajai’s professional editing.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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