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She was born Erika LaBrie, and for a long time, her life was as normal as anyone else’s. Which is to say, not very, but she could probably have gotten away with it had she kept one important fact quiet. A fact that was a part of her long before she ever went to Paris.

After all, you can imagine meeting her, asking what her hobbies are, and she’d reply “archery!” This is cool in every century, and the more you ask about that hobby, the more you find out that this goes far, far beyond a pastime and well into the world of livelihood. She has spent ten years on the United States National Archery Team and has several national championships to her name. You might want to stick around with this because then you start asking about her surname.

She’s not Erika LaBrie anymore. She is, in fact, Erika Eiffel now. It’s her married name, she says. Ah. One hell of a red flag there. Don’t worry, they have an arrangement, she says. After all, he lives in Paris. Oh, huh, a man named Eiffel who lives in Paris, that must be a nightmare, you say, and she smiles. Oh no, he’s not a man. He’s the Eiffel Tower. It sounds like a bit at first, but she keeps. On. Doubling. Down. You’re not misunderstanding anything. She’s married to the Eiffel Tower.

You see, Eiffel has… I suppose we’d call it a condition, but she’d call it a sexuality called Objectum sexuality. It means pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, and according to Eiffel, it’s something she’d felt her whole life – the story begins when she joined the US Air Force, she says that while she was in basic training, another cadet tried to sexually assault her, but she was able to fight him off with a training sword… That sword became her comfort blanket, so much so that she would sneak it into bed, as she was unable to sleep without it.

This blossomed into a personality disorder so bad that the Air Force had to let her go.

How did this woman marry the Eiffel Tower?

Eiffel’s bond with inanimate objects went far beyond a training sword, and far beyond a mere attachment too. This was, if you asked her, a full-on sexuality where the bonds she made with inanimate objects were often romantic and, yes, sexual. This was a woman who probably could have been an Olympian due to her talent and application to her skill with a bow and arrow, then came clean about being in a “romantic relationship” with her bow and suddenly all of them were gone.

Which makes this something apart from a kink, to me. Because this isn’t something that Eiffel felt the need to ever keep quiet about, the way that we all (hopefully) keep quiet about the things that get our rocks off. Eiffel sees her relationships as just that, relationships, whether they’re with her bow, her “husband” of multiple decades or her great love before she met the tower, the Berlin Wall. That last one was actually something of a love triangle. The Berlin Wall was married when Eiffel came into the picture.

At the very least, she has a sense of humour about it. In an interview with Vice, she talks openly about how no one knows just how strange and impractical her love life is better than hers. She says, “People think I can just point at an object and decide to love it. They think I can’t develop relationships with people, so I choose objects so I can have control. But I had no control over my relationship to the Eiffel Tower. If this was all about control, I’d love my toaster, you know?”

If love really is love no matter what, sometimes you’ve got to give people the grace to love things that you can’t understand. In most cases, that’s their taste in music or their fashion sense. In Erika Eiffel’s case, it’s something that barely anyone can relate to. Perhaps we’ve just got to be OK with that.