On June 4 a 37-year-old woman from San Francisco - Erika La Tour Eiffel, née Erika La Tour - married the Eiffel Tower, in a ceremony attended by 12 friends. Of course, in many ways this is quite a melancholy fact. La Tour Eiffel had an unhappy childhood, cannot form trusting romantic relationships with other human beings and feels safe in investing love only in things that cannot possibly hurt her. Unless, obviously, there is some deep structural damage, exacerbated by a minor earth tremor - in which case a piece of the Eiffel Tower could shear off, and hurt the new Mrs La Tour Eiffel quite a bit.

La Tour Eiffel's unresolved emotional state is reflected in the buildings she falls in love with. Before she was with the Eiffel Tower, she was in love with the Berlin Wall - scarcely the warm, supportive, stable structure of one's dreams. Second-time around, and one wouldn't want to bet the house on her current relationship lasting either. Despite its venerability, the Eiffel Tower is still out on the town, seven nights a week, like a big, iron Peter Stringfellow. It has women crawling all over it. It's hard to see how the new Mrs La Tour Eiffel will get the commitment she craves. Her fatal weakness seems to be for high-profile, trophy buildings, the architectural equivalent of rock stars. I can't help but feel that, as she matures, she will find she has nothing in common with these global icons. My warm hope is that she will eventually give up on these high (in the case of the Eiffel Tower 968ft, or 300m)-profile buildings, and find a more low-key, sustainable happiness with a nearby municipal building - a library, maybe. I hope that they get to settle down, experience true love and maybe raise a couple of small outhouses together.

As you can imagine, La Tour Eiffel's marriage was generally viewed, in the media portals of the world, as an extraordinary, freakish thing - a bit like those odd two weeks when Courtney Love went out with Steve Coogan, only more so. La Tour Eiffel is apparently an objectum sexual: someone who becomes aroused by inanimate objects. Previous case studies have entered into relationships with cars, Hammond organs, a metal-processing machine and the twin towers - the last one of which would presumably also count as some manner of “architectural incest”, too.

The thing is, we're all objectum sexuals, really. We might not go as far as promising to love, honour and obey the Thames barrier, but we're all still in love with things: we just lack the carefree confidence and, frankly, the balls, to admit it. Huge swaths of our culture make sly, knowing references to our crushes on a range of inanimate objects, but we never come right out and admit the truth: that watching silver American Airlines planes take off makes us feel all “fizzy” in our tummies. That we want to touch-touch-touch the shiny chrome on a panini machine. And that the way we feel about that ratty old dressing-gown is the way Sam Gamgee felt about Mr Frodo, and that they'll take it down the charity shop over our literally cold, dead bodies.

We all love things. I know I do. I think the full William Morris quote was: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful - or that doesn't turn you on a little bit.” Certainly my love of things makes me behave as irrationally as a teenage girl around her school's equivalent of Danny Zuko. Personally, Cafédirect instant coffee granules taste much nicer than “real” coffee, and cost only £3.69 to boot! Yet I am so excited by depressing the plunger on the cafetière that I drink litres of expensive, bitter jivey-brew every day just so that I can slowly squash the grounds down to the bottom of the jug. When I “bip” my Oyster card on a bus I feel smooth and clean inside. In any large stationer's I will spend £20 on black felt-tip calligraphy-nibbed pens (the kind that make a satisfying scritchy, rat-like noise when you write) even though my every communication is via a keyboard. As for my house full of iPhones, MacBooks and iPods - well, Apple is a brand based entirely on the acceptable face of objectum sexuality. Each time it invents a new item the adverts show it writhing around like an electrical equivalent of the Pussycat Dolls, singing: “Don't you wish your inferior, boxy Ericsson communications device was hot like me?” Apple is a fetishist, pimping its electro-hos to a cabal of eager perverts. You need only look at the face of someone scrolling through his/her iPhone's revolutionary “Visual Voicemail” function to see that.

And I - I am one of Apple's most ardent johns. Every September I buy a new Mac laptop and, after I've bought it, I go for lunch. It was only three years into this ritual that I realised that what I was actually doing was taking my new laptop on a date; almost certainly to ensure that it subsequently liked me. But then, I spend upwards of six hours a day with my laptop and if, for whatever electrical reason, it didn't like me, I'd be lying face down on the floor screaming: “But WHY don't you recognise the SMTP server address? In God's name WHY?” and watching my life grind to a halt. So who, really, is the objectum sexual fool here? After all, I've never yet had a MacBook leave me for another columnist. I seem to be a pretty hot prospect for a young laptop on the go.

You see, I think objectum sexuality is far too narrow a definition for the full reality of human emotions. Let's face it: the whole world is pretty damn sexy really. The dawn is fruity, hard rain is horny, a hurricane makes me CRAZY IN LOVE. If mankind had ladders long enough, the world would be empty, as we'd be rolling around with the Moon, that juicy beast, with never a thought about tomorrow. Yes, damn it. I'm coming out as a proud objectum sexual. And through this rather ravishing door, which I'd really like to get to know better.

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