We joke about marrying ourselves or a platonic friend if some arbitrary amount of time has passed without a proposal from an imaginary suitor. And sure, some people do wind up marrying a friend in more of a business arrangement, but it’s not very common that someone follows through with marrying themselves.
Dorothy “Dottie” Fideli, decided that she was going to break the mold. The 77-year-old sat down and thought about all of the things she had done in life and who was with her the entire time cheering her on. It was an easy answer: herself. She was her biggest cheerleader, the person who always showed up and the love of her life, so Fideli made the plan to marry herself.
On a beautiful May day, friends and family gathered in the O’Bannon Terrace Retirement Community, where Fideli is a resident, to witness the ceremony.
“I have been with myself for 40 years. Something just came over me one day in church that, ‘you want to do something special for yourself,'” Fideli told KCEN.
It was Fideli’s daughter, Donna Pennington, that helped her pull together the emotional ceremony, complete with a wedding dress and an officiant. The grandmother spent most of her life raising her three children and helping to care for her grandchildren, and she felt like it was time to do something for herself.
This isn’t Fideli’s first marriage. She was actually married once before in 1965, but she didn’t get to have a wedding. Fideli and her ex-husband were married in a courthouse ceremony where she wore a black dress and were divorced nine years later. Something tells me that this marriage is going to last a lifetime though.
You can catch a glimpse of her wedding below: