A woman so fed up with the dating scene and single life has become the first person in Britain to marry herself.<\/p>\n
Grace Gelder even ‘proposed’ to herself on a park bench and staged a full wedding ceremony with 50 guests.<\/p>\n
The photographer said that after being single for six years she had built up a brilliant relationship with herself – and creating that bond with someone else seemed like too much hard work.<\/p>\n
Inspired by the Bj\u00f6rk song Isobel, which includes the line, ‘My name’s Isobel, married to myself’, the Londoner said the lyric struck a chord with her and it was then she decided to walk solo down the aisle.<\/p>\n
From proposing to herself on the park bench in Parliament Hill, London, last November, right through to the ceremony in mid-March this year, the matrimony was approached like an ordinary wedding.<\/p>\n
Grace\u00a0bought a dress, a ring, rehearsed vows\u00a0and eventually wed in a farmhouse in rural Devon watched by her sister and friends -sealing the deal by planting a kiss on a mirror.<\/p>\n
Speaking to the Guardian, she said: “A few did comment, in a light-hearted way, that it was a bit narcissitic. Obviously, if you have just announced you\u2019re marrying yourself, it is plainly a statement of self-love, and I was under no illusion how self-indulgent that might appear.<\/p>\n
“But I was completely comfortable with my motivations. I\u2019d been on a journey of personal development using meditation, dance and performance to\u00a0increase my self-awareness.<\/p>\n
“Included in this was a Shakti Tantra\u00a0programme focused on sexuality and how this was bound up with making agreements with yourself and other people.<\/p>\n
“Sitting on that park bench, it dawned on me that a self-marriage ceremony witnessed by other people would potentially be this massively powerful means of making those agreements stick.”<\/p>\n
Grace was wed by her friend Tiu – a celebrant – who backed her plans and said the deal would set her up for a new phase of life.<\/p>\n
But Grace suffered a case of the\u00a0pre-wedding jitters\u00a0only a month before the big day and had to be convinced she was doing the right thing.<\/p>\n
Although the wedding holds no legal ground, Grace is glad she is no longer a ‘single’ lady.<\/p>\n
She added: “It felt like a really big deal saying my vows, which were mostly about me promising to take more risks in matters of the heart. I really don\u2019t see it as any kind of feminist statement, but creating a wedding of this kind on my own terms felt incredibly empowering.”<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: Mirror UK<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A woman so fed up with the dating scene and single life has become the first person in Britain to marry herself. Grace Gelder even ‘proposed’ to herself on a park bench and staged a full wedding ceremony with 50 guests. The photographer said that after being single for six years she had built up […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":20,"featured_media":54038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[7],"class_list":["post-54037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-togbe-afede-xiv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/20"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/54038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}