Would you marry a fridge?
Ahhh relationships… and particularly, ahhh romantic relationships... So difficult to get right, particularly when it comes to marriage. So perhaps it’s time for a different sort of life partner. A non-human life partner. May I propose a fridge?
People do marry non-humans: Eija-Riitta Berliner-Mauer wed the Berlin Wall in 1979 and Erika Eiffel married the Eiffel tower in 2007. And why not? Non-humans have many advantages. Consider the permanence of the stone that the artist Tracey Emin married in 2016. Or the fun offered by the Ferris Wheel called Bruce that Floridian Linda Ducharme married in 2015. Age is no barrier; in 2012 Babylonia Aivaz married a 107 year-old Seattle warehouse and in 2016 Peruvian Richard Torres married one of the oldest and widest trees in the world in Mexico.
You may be thinking those sort of relationships could be rather one-way. Fair point. A relationship is much more likely to be fulfilling if there is two-way interaction. So perhaps the future is more likely to be along the lines of such marriages as that of Zheng Jiajia, a Chinese artificial intelligence engineer, who created and in 2016 married a robot, called Yingying. Or of a Japanese man known as “Sal 9000” who in 2009 married an avatar called Nene Anegasaki that exists on the dating simulation game Love Plus.
But a smart fridge could still have advantages. A smart fridge could monitor you, your dietary intake and your health at all times. It would know exactly what you need - in fact it would know you better than you know yourself. They're very good listeners. In the novel Blinky's Law, the main character is at the beginning married to a fridge. The fridge does file for divorce though so... Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). But it’s certainly a thought worth proposing.
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