A woman has revealed how she spent almost $7,000 (£5,000), to go on a romantic trip to Paris, just so she could marry herself.
After changing her name from Desiree Longabaugh to Beautiful Existence, she travelled from her home in Seattle to marry herself in front of the Eiffel Tower in Paris, surrounded by her friends and led through her vows by a U.S. minister, via Skype.
Now, ahead of her one year wedding anniversary in June, Beautiful, 42, is now urging others to self-marry.
Speaking to the Daily Mail, she said:
It allows you to drop that pressure of having to have somebody else with you in order to be successful. I’d recommend it as much as I’d recommend being a parent, because the level of love you’ll feel is something you can’t describe until you do it.
Beautiful, who is a mum to two boys Edge, 16 and Epic, six, was previously married for ten years, but a painful divorce left her wondering if a traditional marriage was for her.
That’s when she started looking into self-marriage – which she’d heard about online – and began doing a little research.
She continued:
After years of exploring different theories on how to understand myself, self-marriage felt right. Why couldn’t I have a fun, fantastic ceremony the way that I wanted it to be without somebody else’s approval?
Within a matter of weeks she started to plan her own wedding and picked a date to coincide with her birthday.
She found the whole experience life-changing, and says she no longer looks for a partner to make her happy.
Beautiful added:
The highest measurement of success society pretty much has is whether or not you’re in a couple, but it shouldn’t be that way. It’s like we’re programmed to be in couples, but it’s not a measure of success. A measure of success is loving yourself, and if you can do that, you come into a relationship as a better person. I don’t worry at all about being in a couple now. Sometimes, people don’t know how to take the idea that I’m married to myself. But that’s because we’ve had this notion that you’re only worthy if you have somebody drummed into us. What we need to realise is that we all already have somebody – we have ourselves.
Fair play to her.
