With this herring I thee wed

updated 2:48 p.m. ET Jan. 3, 2006

JERUSALEM - Sharon Tendler met Cindy 15 years ago. She said it was love at first sight. This week she finally took the plunge and proposed. The lucky "guy" plunged right back.

In a modest ceremony at Dolphin Reef in the southern Israeli port of Eilat, Tendler, a 41-year-old British citizen, apparently became the world's first person to "marry" a dolphin.

Dressed in a white dress, a veil and pink flowers in her hair, Tendler got down on one knee on the dock and gave Cindy a kiss. And a piece of herring.

"It's not a perverted thing. I do love this dolphin. He's the love of my life," she said Saturday, upon her return to London.

Tendler, who said she imports clothes and promotes rock bands in England, has visited Israel several times a year since first meeting the dolphin.

When asked in the past if she had a boyfriend, she would always reply, "No. I'm going to end up with Cindy." On Wednesday, she made it official, sort of. While she acknowledged the "wedding" had no legal bearing she did say it reflected her deep feelings toward the bottlenosed, 35-year-old object of her affection.

"It's not a bad thing. It’s just something that we did because I love him, but not in the way that you love a man. It's just a pure love that I have for this animal," she said.

While she still kept open the option of "marrying human" at some stage, she said for now she was strictly a "one-dolphin woman."

She's hardly the jealous type, though.

"He will still play with all the other girls there," she said, of their prenuptial agreement. "I hope he has a lot of baby dolphins with the other dolphins. The more dolphins the better."

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