Meet Eija-Riitta Eklöf – Berliner-Mauer – for all intents and purposes a typical middle-aged woman living in the small village of Liden in Northern Sweden. The name, however, may have already alerted some readers to the fact that Eija-Riitta is not your ordinary Swedish woman, since she claims to have been married to the Berlin Wall since 1979.

Perhaps it is best to hear the story straight from her (or at least, straight from her website):

This statement may prompt most of us to assume that we are already in the realm of the pathological, or at least dealing with someone who should be approached under the abstract auspices of “mental health.” However, we should not be overly hasty in judging Mrs Eklöf-Berliner-Mauer's love for objects, for this love may be merely an intense version of something we all feel from time to time, and thus reveals something significant about an age which – at least since Marx – is “regulated by an ultimate object outside itself; consumption.”

Before exploring the various versions of objectum sexuality (both within and beyond manifestations of a “syndrome”), perhaps we should hear more about this love: