It's come to this

One night at a bar, when a man noticed the engagement ring and asked, “Who’s the lucky guy?” Erika looked at her hand and quipped, “Myself!” She said it jokingly. But then she started to think about it. Why not commit to herself? “When you’re single, society tells you that you are a woman who has not been chosen by someone else,” she says. “I decided to choose myself. It was an act of defiance.”

Not that she has anything against happy couples. She plans to keep dating, and she appreciates the “ceremony and symbolism” of traditional marriage. “There’s something about people coming together and saying, ‘We see you, we support you, we’re in it with you,'” she says. With that in mind, she started making her wedding plans. She wanted to keep it simple, for herself and for everyone attending. She found her dress on ModCloth.com, and bought pair of retro-style wedge sandals for a ’60s vibe. She had a personalized rose-gold bracelet made by a designer on Etsy that says “I choose you” in French.

Not everyone understood. Her dad back home in the Midwest asked, “Is this for real?” A guy she knew said it sounded narcissistic and pointless. But Erika says loving yourself, and being yourself, is a good thing. “I think freedom should mean freedom to choose our own path,” she says. “And marrying yourself isn’t surrendering to the wedding-industrial complex. It’s saying yes to something new.”