If you love your phone so much, why don’t
you marry it?
... Hello? ... Mom?
Aaron Chervenak is truly living the dream
of Joaquin Phoenix’s character in the futuristic
romantic dramedy Her. On May 20th, Chervenak
married his smartphone at the Little Las Vegas
Chapel. While Chervenak didn’t disclose
his phone’s brand or operating system, he
assigned it a female gender, taking “her”
as his battery-operated “bride.” Speaking
to Kaspersky Lab, which produced a video profiling
the happy couple, Chervenak explained: “If
we’re gonna be honest with ourselves, we
connect with our phones on so many emotional
levels. We look to it for solace, to calm
us down, to put us to sleep, to ease our minds,
and to me, that’s also what a relationship
is about.”
Why risk inevitable rejection on Tinder when
your smartphone can keep you company unconditionally?
The state of Nevada won’t legally recognize
the union, but Chervenak says it’s “a
symbolic gesture to show us how precious our
phones are becoming in our daily lives.”
For some folks though, publicly committing
to an inanimate object is a genuine expression
of love and even attraction. In the early
1970s, a Swedish woman named Eija-Ritta Eklof
Berliner-Mauer coined the term “objectum-sexuality”
to describe her attraction to non-living things.
Then in 1979, she married the Berlin wall.
Thanks to the internet, Ms. Berliner-Mauer
found others who shared her peculiar passion.
One of those folks was Erika LaBrie, who legally
renamed herself Erika Eiffel after “marrying”
the Eiffel Tower in 2007. Also the founder
of the online support group Objectum Sexuality
Internationale, Ms. Eiffel became the most
publicly visible member of the objectophile
community after being the subject of the 2012
documentary “Married to the Eiffel Tower.”
But the Eiffel tower hasn’t been the only
structure to catch objectophilic Erika’s
eye. Prior to her 2007 commitment ceremony,
she had forged relationships with a fighter
jet, fence and her archery bow. As of 2015
Ms. Eiffel had reluctantly moved on from her
towering Parisian paramour after the documentary
she featured in wasn’t received favorably
by the Eiffel Tower staff. She tentatively
began dating a crane – as in the machine,
not the bird. Clinical sexologists have documented
objectum sexuality among both women and men
by, although scant data exist to quantify
how many objectophiles exist around the world.
So what’s your relationship with your smartphone
like? Have you ever wanted to marry a landmark?
Get in touch and let us know and be sure to
keep up with us at now.howstuffworks.com
because you just might fall in love.
