by 
“Love is love.” Well, it may be in English, but it isn’t in Greek. For the most versatile language in the world, it is a surprise that we have one word to cover so many ideas and experiences. The Greeks have four words. It seems obvious to them that there are at least four very different experiences of loving someone. The affectionate bond you feel for a family member isn’t the same as you feel for someone you fancy in the street. Or if is is, you’re in trouble.
sloLinda Baker was the first woman to do it. It was 1993, and she had just reached 40. She decided to marry herself, and had a very cute ceremony.
It was the beginning of a small trend that is set to grow. This autumn, many of our mainstream newsapers have been running stories about women who married themselves.
Same sex marriage was only the beginning; once the defintion For those who find the idea of monogamy boring, there are other variations. Same sex marriage obviously, and polygamy of course. But there are demands for polyamory (mixed partners of indeterminate kinds) and even incest. Patricia and Misty Spann (43 & 25) are a mother and daughter who married each other in Oklahoma. Not quite what the musical famous for “Riding in a Surrey with a fringe on top” had in mind.
Kim West gave her baby up for adoption at just a few weeks. But she has found him again. Last year she was reunited with her son Ben Ford, and found she has more feelings for him than she had expected. He too was attracted to his ‘mummy girlfriend’ so he left his wife Victoria and decided to marry his mum. After all, as he told the Daily Mirror, “the sex was incredible.” Anyway, it isn’t really incest. It’s something that scientists have called “Genetic Sexual Attraction.” Still, it has the usual components of romantic and sexual feelings, and it makes them happy, for now, so it must be ok. As the progressives always say “why not?”
And now there is Solygamy; which comes as a bit of relief after ‘GSA.” It’s catching on it seems. There was Sara Sharpe, who wrote about her self-marriage in A Dress, A Ring, Promises to Self. And there’s Nadine Schweigert, a thirty-six-year-old-woman from Fargo, North Dakota, who was interviewed by Anderson Cooper after marrying herself in front of some forty of her closest friends. “I, Nadine,” she said to herself, “promise to enjoy inhabiting my own life and to relish a lifelong love affair with my beautiful self.”
The Greeks were a canny lot, and developed some popular stories for explain what could go wrong at times like this. The myth about Oedipus is the one most people know best. It didn’t end well, as I suspect Kim and Ben’s story may not.
There was Narcissus too of course. A little less famous than Oedipus, whom Freud made so popular.
@Lives0n When your heart stops beating, you’ll keep tweeting. Welcome to your social after life.