Last week, a 41-year-old Italian woman called Laura Mesi put on a white dress and veil to walk down the aisle. She met only the officiant at the end of it: With her 70 guests as her witnesses, Mesi was there to marry herself. There was a three-tiered cake, and dancing, and a subsequent solo “honeymoon” in Egypt. “You can have a fairy tale even without the prince,” she told the Italian newspaper La Repubblica.

Mesi’s unconventional ceremony (and the professional photos of it that she shared on Facebook) drew plenty of media attention, perhaps because she had reportedly become the first woman to ever have such a ceremony in Italy. But Mesi is actually just the latest in a growing number of women who have decided to show their eternal love to themselves by putting a ring on it—sometimes literally.

“If I’m talking to someone I might be interested in, I point to my ring and explain that I married myself,” says Erika Anderson, a 36-year-old writer who threw herself a wedding last year. “Not everyone cares about rings, but it’s good to be clear.” After her experience, Anderson knows how a self-marriage can be hard for some people to understand. When her wedding video went viral last year, she received hate mail and even had a reporter banging on her apartment door. “I think women marrying themselves might seem incredibly threatening because it looks like we’re saying men are irrelevant,” she posits. “But we’re actually just saying that we matter.”

The concept of self-marriage has gained enough popularity that it has even managed to spawn “self-wedding” kits from a website called IMarriedMe.com; the package includes a single wedding ring, vows, and affirmation cards. But whatever you do, don’t start calling these women sologamists. “We’re not some kind of en masse movement of weird, narcissistic women,” says Anderson. “As far as I know, we each came to this decision on our own.”

We asked another self-married woman, Sasha Cagen, a life coach and author of Quirkyalone: A Manifesto for Uncompromising Romantics, to open up on why she decided to tie the knot with herself, and why today she’s dedicated to helping other single women do the same.