Till Death Do Me Part
On "Megan Married Herself" by Caroline Bird and the Challenges of Loving Yourself
This past year, I’ve been discussing a poem with my students titled “Megan Married Herself” by Caroline Bird– I highly recommend checking it out (click poem title to read it). Recently, I read it aloud for a group of students and became unexpectedly emotional. The poem had never affected me that way before, and we worked as a group to discuss some of the concerns I have with the poem.
Typically, if I ask the general question: “what’s this poem about?” students will often answer, with no hesitation, “It’s about loving yourself!”
Great– that’s definitely what the poem is implying. Megan, by marrying herself, is choosing self-love. But I told them something that caused the students to pause and contemplate. I said the phrase “self-love” makes me uncomfortable; I don’t like it. They asked me why.
We see this concept of “loving yourself” plastered on inspirational keychains, stickers, and wall posters. Peruse TikTok or Instagram reels from self-help influencers and armchair therapists, and you’ll hear this phrase repeatedly.
“You must learn to love and accept yourself for who you are.”
On the surface, there is nothing inherently wrong with this idea. But it’s one of those things that sounds nice and makes us feel good, until we realize it’s not really clear how we do this. After all, there is a lot wrong with me and everyone else on Earth. If you're a conscious, self-aware, living person, you could probably name an endless list of things you dislike about yourself or know should be fixed. There’s a hint of potential narcissism in this idea. And I’ve personally seen people take the concept and twist it into unhealthy, destructive territory. They mistake “loving yourself” as positive self-talk and convincing yourself that you are “perfect just the way you are.” Except, deep down, we all know we’re not perfect.
And it doesn’t seem to me that “self-love” is enough to fix these imperfections. It would be like lifting the hood of your busted car, looking at the smoking engine, and saying, “Well, if I just love my car enough, maybe it’ll be fixed.”
And the real, uncomfortable truth many people struggle with, including many of my generation, is that we really do need other people’s love. It’s part of the human condition. We require acceptance, validation, and love. We seek this in friendships, family, relationships, marriage, work, etc. It’s much easier for someone to say, “I don’t need anybody else; I don’t care what anyone else thinks. I love myself!”-- you see this idea expressed in many young women, who have been unfairly treated in past relationships. Young men are no exception– just look at the “red pill” movement, which posits that it isn't the men, it’s everyone else’s fault. Women are too picky, their standards are too high, etc. etc. People with a normal amount of brain cells will see these ideas and immediately toss them into the nonsense bin. Because it is nonsense. You cannot rely solely on yourself for peace, growth, happiness, or love.
And yet, we hear these platitudes about loving yourself, and it excites us. It rings true. We know we need to do this; we need to accept ourselves. But what does that look like?
I think Bird’s poem points us toward a potential solution. It’s not enough to love ourselves; we must marry ourselves. People make the mistake of believing that marriage is all about love. While love, hopefully, is a strong component of any marriage, it isn’t the intention behind the ritual of marriage. In the U.S., our conception of marriage comes from religious beginnings– the idea being that “two become one flesh.” In a sense, marriage is the symbolic and spiritual representation of two identities becoming whole— lifelong commitment. It’s not just that you love someone, it’s that you are with them, till death. Love, as powerful and incredible as it is, is flimsy, dynamic, and unstable. Ask anyone who has been married for a long period of time, and you will learn that loving someone in such a committed fashion is not easy. Commitment requires love, but it also requires sacrifice, compromise, acceptance, and choice.
The reason most marriages (and most relationships) fail is because people have distorted ideas of what love is.
“What do you love about them?”...
“I love that he makes $300k a year.”
“I love that she’s super hot.”
“I love how tall he is.”
“I love how she makes me feel.”
All valid reasons to like someone– but not enough to love them. Would you love someone if they had $3,000 or a $1 million? Would you love them with a six-pack or would you love them overweight? Would you love them when they make you happy and when they also make you mad? Many of us know that these reasons are not indicative of true love, yet we are so easily swayed and influenced by them. The validation we often crave is for superficial things, because those are the things we can touch, feel, hear, understand.
Truly loving someone requires us to move beyond just loving those superficial things and move into accepting them. And this is what marriage is often symbolizing. Marriage is saying, “I love all these amazing things about you, but I also know there’s a lot wrong with you. Yet I understand you. I love you. I choose to love you.”
Now that we can understand what the purpose of marriage is, what does it mean to then “marry yourself?” The key to understanding this comes at the end of the poem. A guest at Megan’s self-wedding is contemplating this very concept. He imagines “what his life might’ve been if / he’d responded, years ago, to that offer in his head: / ‘I’m the only one who will ever truly understand you. / Marry me, Derek. I love you. Marry me.’
Later, he whispers to himself, as Megan cuts the cake, “Is it too late for us to try?”
There is a lot of regret in these thoughts. Earlier, we know that he looks toward his wife. Perhaps he feels that before he married her, he should have married himself. Because, as uncomfortable as the phrase “love yourself” can make me, I also know that it must happen. We cannot love others unless we love ourselves. Sappy, corny, dumb, yeah. But true.
How do we do this? Is it looking at ourselves in the mirror and saying, “You look amazing today”? Well… no. Because my teeth are still crooked. Is self-love reminding yourself, “You are successful. You make good money”? Again… no. Because I could lose all that money tomorrow, and maybe it would end up being my stupid fault.
So, if we shouldn’t base love on superficial things, what do we base it on? I think we need to love our souls. And what’s a “soul,” exactly? Hell if I know! But I know it’s real. I can’t see it. I can’t touch it. I can’t hear it. But I know it. And I know that my soul is a lot uglier than my crooked teeth or my bank account.
Carl Jung wrote, “No tree, it is said, can grow to heaven unless its roots reach down to hell.” Loving yourself, accepting yourself, understanding yourself, then marrying yourself means taking both halves of you– the good and the bad– and marrying them together. The two becoming one. If I were to marry myself, it means having to marry the parts of me I don’t want— that I wish were different or would go away. Accepting those parts of myself doesn’t mean excusing them, it means recognizing them, understanding them, and working to improve them.
I cannot love the “ideal” version of me. This is a mistake that so many people make, including me, when looking to love and be loved by other people. We love the idea of the person, not who they really are (the soul). To love myself, I must love who I really am.
And it all sounds so obvious, so simple, so easy. But we know it is not. Because we know each morning we wake up, we wake up next to our ideal self. We look in the mirror and we see who we are versus who we desire to be. And that ideal is what burdens us. It burdens us because we know we may never reach it, no matter how hard we try.
But I cannot think of anything more loving and accepting than continuing to try. I know what’s wrong with me, but I will continue to try. Maybe what makes me so uncomfortable about “self-love” is not that it’s wrong, false, or unachievable, but that it’s so, so hard.
Megan marries herself, and Derek contemplates this bizarre scenario, recognizing the sad truth behind it. And as I read the poem aloud, I think this same realization washed over me. I imagined myself at the wedding, sitting next to Derek, wondering to myself, “Is it too late to try?”
I will wake up tomorrow morning, and I will look at myself in the mirror and see everything that’s wrong with me. But maybe, if I make a choice to see my whole self, bare and vulnerable, I will say, “I love you. Not who you or others want you to be, but who you really are.”
Maybe the next day, I’ll change my mind. Maybe over the years that love will fade, or it will blossom into lasting peace. Regardless, I know that I cannot truly learn to love others, or to be loved, until I first marry myself. And that marriage requires a true love, a love of both the darkness and the light of my soul, which I cannot touch, but I can always know, always grasping but never fully touching. Till death do me part.
So, no, it’s not too late to try.