People Married to Walls, Buildings, and Goats

A Sudanese goat named Rose was married to a man found having sex with her. The black and white goat's owner discovered the man, Charles Tombe, copulating with the animal. Local elders in the South Sudan capital, Juba, forced Mr Tombe to pay a dowry of 15,000 Sudanese dinars to the goat's owner and wed her as punishment.

Bicycles and picnic tables
But a goat is relatively "normal" compare to people who have been arrested for having sex with objects such as a bicycle and a picnic table. Karl Watkins, an electrician, was jailed for having sex with pavements in England, in 1993.

Married to the Berlin Wall
Then there are people who marry objects, such as buildings and walls. One Woman 'married' to Berlin Wall for 29 years. Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, 54, whose surname means Berlin Wall in German, wed the concrete structure in 1979 after being diagnosed with a condition called Objectum-Sexuality.

Mrs Berliner-Mauer claimed she fell in love with the structure when she first saw it on television when she was seven. She began collecting "his" pictures and saving up for visits. On her sixth trip in 1979 they tied the knot before a handful of guests.

She remains a virgin with humans, but insists she has a full, loving relationship with the wall. Mrs Berliner-Mauer, said: "I find long, slim things with horizontal lines very sexy. "The Great Wall of China's attractive, but he’s too thick – my husband is sexier."

While the rest of mankind rejoiced when the Wall, erected by the Soviets in 1961, was torn down in 1989, its "wife" was horrified. She's never been back and now keeps models depicting "his" former glory.

She said: “What they did was awful. They mutilated my husband." She is said to have shifted her affections to a nearby garden fence. She is an objectophiliac. Objectum-Sexual or objectophilia is feelings of love, attraction, arousal, and commitment for a particular object.

Married to the Eiffel Tower
Then there is the woman who married the Eiffel Tower. Her emotional needs are met by a 1,000ft iron monument in France.

She too belongs to the strange world of the "objectum sexual"– a group of people, mainly women, whose intimate lives revolve around objects with which they say they share romantic and sexual love.

She also, has taken on the name of the tower for her surname. Her name is Erika La Tour Eiffel and lives in San Francisco. She had a ceremony with friends last year in Paris, at which she promised eternal love to the iron monument and changed her name legally to reflect the bond. "There is a huge problem with being in love with a public object," she says sadly. "The issue of intimacy – or rather lack of it – is forever present."

Radios and stereos
Then there is a lady whose fixations are radios and stereos. When she was interviewed, she was in love with a hi-fi system which she called Jake. Jake, she says, is "solid, reliable and beautiful". She repairs "him" whenhe goes wrong, and "makes love" to him on average twice a day. "This is the way I communicate with him."

Space ships, Twin Towers, and church organs
Amy W. is a 32-year-old who also lives in New York State. She has been in relationships with models of spaceships, the Twin Towers, a church organ and a banister, though her main lover – since OS people believe in polygamy – is a fairground ride called 1001 Nacht, located at Knoebels, an amusement park in New York State.

Why?
Why people really fall in love with objects is a controversial issue. The OS members believe it to be metaphysical but most of the women interviewed had serious difficulties in early childhood, from severe sexual abuse to abandonment and rejection.

David Morgan, a senior psychoanalyst at the Portman NHS Trust for sexual dysfunctions, believes the condition usually stems from having been treated in early childhood like "an inanimate, unfeeling object, so the person forms a psychic retreat by taking refuge in a world where objects are idealised. In other words, when your parents or carers let you down badly, you might turn to more reliable bonds: objects, food, virtual reality..."

The Berlin Wall as a soul-mate
Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer, says: "We have been together now for many years, spiritually if not physically. Like every married couple, we have our ups and downs. We even made it through the terrible disaster of November 9, 1989, when my husband was subjected to frenzied attacks by a mob. But we are still as much in love as the day we met. It may not be a conventional marriage, but neither of us cares much for conventions. Ours is a story of two beings in love, our souls entwined for all eternity."