My dad loves the Eiffel Tower, for some reason. He has a little one in his home office that lights up in the same pattern as the real thing, and his office office calendar has 12 lovely shots of the famous structure. Consequently, I tend to notice references to the Eiffel Tower, in books and newspapers and the like.

But I apparently missed this story the first time around:

Woman with objects fetish marries Eiffel Tower
Erika La Tour Eiffel, 37, a former soldier who lives in San Francisco, has been in love with objects before. Her first infatuation was with Lance, a bow that helped her to become a world-class archer, she is fond of the Berlin Wall and she claims to have a physical relationship with a piece of fence she keeps in her bedroom.

But it is the Eiffel Tower she has pledged to love, honour and obey in an intimate ceremony attended by a handful of friends.

She revisits the massive structure as part of a documentary on [BBC channel] Five on Objectum-Sexual women. There are around 40 people in the world who have declared themselves OS, all of them women and many of them also Asperger’s Syndrome sufferers.

The OS term was first coined by Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, a 54-year-old woman who has been “married” to the Berlin Wall for 29 years.

[snip]

Jerry Brooker, from New York State, one of the psychotherapists interviewed for the documentary, said that OS women were motivated by a need for control.

“Someone who falls in love with objects can control that relationship on their own terms,” he said. “Their objects will not let them down. That is extremely attractive for a person who is otherwise often desperately lonely.”

And people worry about the evolution of artificial intelligence and sex robots.

[some time passes]

Now I can’t stop thinking about the romantic orientation of various structures, and what it means to have committed relationship with something that doesn’t have a gender or a central nervous system.