After searching for the better part of 77 years, an Ohio woman has finally married her ideal mate: herself.
Ohio resident Dorothy "Dottie" Fideli tied the knot with herself over the weekend in a symbolic ceremony at the O'Bannon Terrace Retirement Community in Goshen, about 30 miles northeast of Cincinnati.
"I said, 'You know what? I've done everything else. Why not? I'm going to marry myself,'" Fideli told Today. "I'm at the point in my life where it's about me now...it's my turn to do what I want to do."
The bride wore a flowing white wedding dress and a lace veil for the ceremony, which was attended by dozens of family members and friends.
"I was nervous," Fideli admitted after the nuptials. "But then I was really happy."
Fideli had once thought it would be "too late" to have a big wedding. She got married once in 1965, but it was a courthouse wedding and 9 years later the marriage ended in divorce. Recently, she thought having a solo wedding might not just fulfil one of her longtime wishes, but it would also bring joy to other residents at the retirement home.
"I do some crazy things around here just to make people laugh," Fideli told Today. "When I see them all down in the dumps, I go get one of my outfits on and dress up and come down, and they smile."
When her daughter found out about the idea, she jumped in head first. She picked up a gown for her mother, decorated the retirement home with balloons, got a two-tiered cake decorated with red roses, and did all the cooking -- including finger sandwiches shaped like wedding bells.
Rob Geiger, the retirement home property manager, performed the ceremony, which included an emotional moment about cultivating self-love.
As the bride held up a white lily, she said "'Everybody takes this outside lily. And they live their life and they think they're happy and everything's going to be hunky-dory, but they don't consider the inside, the little petals inside. The inside is what's important. That's where God's love flows,'" Fideli recalled to Today.
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