90 days of self love

Illustration/Uday Mohite

Cristiane Galera is a lingerie model and influencer from Sao Paulo in Brazil. She has been in the news a couple of times recently, for first, marrying herself. And then, last week for divorcing herself.

Depending on how you think, it is possible to find this event intriguing, puzzling or just ridiculous. But, like all absurd theatre, it is tightly packed with seeds of truth - in Galera's case, about the chimeric phenomena of the influencer.

Galera married herself following several disappointments with cheating boyfriends. This made her dislike men and also feel lonely. None of these responses are the least bit unusual - indeed they are the common reaction to betrayal and heartbreak and mea has been culpa of this every now and then. Thereupon, she felt the need to ‘love herself'. And so, she performed a marriage to herself, which some might argue was more a renewal of vows with her Instagram followers. But is that so different from so many people who marry to keep families and communities happy, to feel loved again in a world that pays lip service to liberty while embracing convention?

After 90 days, however, Galera divorced herself, because she met someone special, enough to leave herself for. That's alright she said, because the wedding allowed her to wear a dress that would let her "highlight my best features, my breasts."

Like Galera, many are the folks who swear by singleness only to renounce and often denounce it when coupledom becomes available. One might argue that you do not choose singleness as much as singleness chooses you, but this statement too does not capture the complexity of personal life. Paradoxically, the term single is primarily defined vis-a-vis marriage or at least coupledom. But the quality of being solitary, or even lonely, is in some ways unrelated to marriage and relationships. Some inherently solitary people marry, while others don't. Intimate life takes many different shapes and the binary of single and married doesn't begin to capture life's experiential truths.

Influencers succeed sometimes through their ability to distil experiences into a simple piece of relatable content. But distillation becomes rigid because the need to maintain influencer status locks influencers into a numerical relationship with their public (for not all public on social media is also a listening audience). Life, experience and knowledge must be converted into a piece of consumable content, always new, experience as a fast moving consumer good. As in soap operas, weddings are really useful for serialised content. The dress, the lehenga, the food, the flowers, the events, the ironic selfies, the selfies with sahelis and yaars, the moment of body-shaming, the triumphing over body shaming or narrow minded relatives (nothing like smashing patriarchy by entering a patriarchal institution, na), the honeymoon, a fortnight later the throwback Thursday post. It's a rich Instagram seam. It's also a log kya kahenge situation of mammoth proportions. When you are content, you must think what people will think all the time-even more than when we were oppressed by social norms, because then every private moment and thought were not part of social currency.

What does this atomised view of the self and others really mean for intimacy in our lives, given influencers rule our consciousness so much? Perhaps it's telling that 90 days of self-love was as much as Galera could handle.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. Reach her at paromita.vohra@mid-day.com