But from the first night I took Sam home, his unpredictable aggression scared me. Out on a walk that first night, he bit a stranger. It wasn’t long before he bit me, too.
And so begins the journey of a very complicated and abusive love story.
If you were to look at the relationship in the perspective of a domestic violence situation, you would never say of a man hurting a woman, “It’s your fault.” But with my pit bull, that is exactly what happens.
“You need to make sure you don’t do anything that might upset him . . . like seeming tense or worried,” a stranger tells me as I sob in the middle of the Washington Square dog park after Sam bites my calf, leaving a dark purple welt. “You need to do better and be more careful how you look at him, because it might alarm him.”
Sam is often such a sweet dog, and I know he doesn’t mean to hurt anyone. When he is loving, he is so loving.
I spend thousands of dollars on multiple trainers and a doggy day care (until he gets kicked out), and eventually bring home the happy-go-lucky Trip, whom Sam takes to immediately. The two of them play all day long. It helps a little bit, but the incidents never go away completely—and now trainers are starting to tell me that I’m putting myself and others in danger.
When I use a muzzle on Sam, he thrashes it into my legs, creating deep and lasting bruises. I can rarely have company over. But despite all of this, I’ve never loved a dog so much.
“He’s a ticking time bomb,” one trainer says.
“Why do you think he was surrendered in the first place?” another says.
“You’re going to get sued,” everyone tells me.
One friend emails me the story of Darla Napora, mauled to death by her pit bull when she was six months pregnant despite doing everything seemingly right and participating actively in pit bull advocacy groups. Another pit bull owner tells me that it hurts the reputation of the entire breed when you don’t immediately surrender or euthanize the dog after the first bite.
“The first bite happened before he even arrived at my home,” I say. “Don’t you think with training he’ll get better?”
“He might,” she says. “But you’re putting your life and others at risk.”
But these two dogs are the only loving constants I have.
Everything reaches a boiling point when Sam bites a neighbor one day. I call multiple animal sanctuaries, and every person I talk to tells me the same thing.
“No one will be able to accept him,” they tell me. “I know it’s painful, but putting him down is the right thing to do.”
I still can’t hear the message, though. When I call my parents crying, it is my father who finally gets through to me.
“Sam wouldn’t want to be responsible for hurting someone,” he says. “You are protecting him, too.”
I call the vet and am told euthanasia costs $431. Crying and numb, I don’t think I can even afford doing what everyone is telling me to do. I go through my wallet and then my change drawer. I have $431 exactly. I call my dad one more time. I feel like I cannot keep putting off what so many people have told me is inevitable, even though it is the hardest decision I’ve ever had to make. As I hold Sam close as the euthanasia is administered, he lets out one final breath, and I am devastated—unable to stop weeping.
“Think of the good times,” the vet tells me as I sit, inconsolable, paralyzed with sobs. “Think of the good times.”
I did not expect this level of obliteration.
When I return home, I feel out of my mind with grief. My other dog, Trip, senses my despair, and he regresses to the old behavior he exhibited before he was trained. He, too, seems miserable and alone, pining for his best friend. I cannot bear to see him so unhappy every day. After speaking to several friends who work with animals for a living, they suggest that rehoming Trip might be the best option. I speak to several potential families, and I find a beautiful one, with a little boy who has always dreamed of a spaniel. When I bring Trip over to see how he likes it, the difference is striking. Trip has a bigger space to run around in, a cat to play with, and a little boy who is his new best friend.
After I transfer Trip’s papers to the family, I am left sobbing once again.
This may be the responsible thing to do, but I’ve never felt so alone. Now I have nothing—except a job where I feel increasingly alone, too. I’ve come a long way, but something clearly needs to change.
chapter nine
* * *
The Guy
2015
After several years of xoJane, I am more burned out than I’ve ever been.
Yes, I’m very proud of a lot of what I do. But the workload of the website is 24/7, and when I write about my own life, everything feels phony and constructed now.
I try a few relationships on for size. I even go back to my old starfuckery ways with Donal Logue. Donal and I talk for hours while he drives cross-country on his trucking routes; he sends me videos of his remote cabin away from Hollywood; and when he’s in New York for TV, I help him run lines for his recurring role on Law & Order: SVU before he’s cast as a lead on Gotham. But he’s not relationship potential. Obviously. There’s a reason why they call it starfucking. No matter how much of a gentleman the person is, you are inherently making yourself small in the process.
Eventually, I just give up on dating.
I don’t want to be hurt, disillusioned, or alienated anymore. I spend most of my date nights counting down until I can come up with a fake reason to leave. One guy spends the whole evening complaining about how difficult it is dealing with these desperate New York women who are so eager to “trap” eligible guys like him.
“Especially the ones on OKC,” he confides to me over drinks. OKC? Wow. He must save so much time not having to say “upid.”
“Yeah,” I say, trying to get in the commiserating spirit. “Totally.”
I’ve long given up on the idea of getting married. I’m too old—I’ll turn forty near the end of the year—and the prospects out there are too vanilla to even see possibility.
I’m sick of crushed expectations, and I just can’t with the boring guys. I’d rather be one of those cool spinster New York ladies than feel like I am forced to spend night after night with someone who lacks a sense of humor or, even worse, thinks he has one—and doesn’t.
I realize that in order to have the one thing that makes me happy—authenticity and connection—that means I can no longer hide parts of myself from anyone.
I have a realization during this time that changes my outlook on love entirely.
I almost write it all up as an xoJane piece, but it feels too precious somehow. I want to nurture it just as I might that little person inside of me.
One day when I am walking to an AA meeting after a long day at xoJane, as I cross the street, I begin absentmindedly praying to one of the saints I’ve always felt most connected to in life: St. Anthony, who is known as the patron saint of lost things. As I pray, I ask the question silently to myself, again and again: Will I ever find my soul mate?
Because maybe, I think, my soul mate is just lost. Maybe that’s all it is. Maybe he just got bad directions.
By the time I reach Forty-Second Street and walk up the stairs to a run-down theater building in Midtown to make the 8 p.m. meeting, the answer to my question comes to me in a flash. I actually stop walking and laugh out loud.
Me. It is me.
I am the soul mate I have been looking for all this time.
I am the only person who can decide if I am the good guy or the bad guy in my story. I am the only person who can decide that I am worthy of love—all the time, even when I am falling down on my face yet again or when I am trying my absolute best.
As I think about this concept, I start exploring and investigating, and the possibilities feel like beams of light and love are shooting into the most bruised and battered parts of my soul. What if I were to truly focus on giving myself all the love and compassion and forgiveness I’ve longed for from someone el
se all my life? What if I no longer beat myself up? What if I learned to treasure the idea of taking care of myself and my heart and my boundaries, even when it felt unnatural and uncomfortable? What if I accepted and forgave the ugliest parts of my history—every guy, every drug, every deception—and stopped terrorizing my heart with impotent regret?
What if I was forgiven and free? What if I always had been?
Maybe all the costumes and disguises and posturing along the way didn’t matter. Because the only self that ever existed could be explained in one single identity.
I am a survivor—and I can and will always be there for myself, no matter what.
After having spent so long chasing some external source of relief in the form of sex and food and drugs and work and even shame itself, realizing that I alone can give myself reprieve feels like the most beautiful gift of all.
I will never let that go. It will never be lost again. I feel unified at last.
* * *
I TELL MY friends. I tell my therapist. I tell my parents and my sister, with whom I’ve finally reconnected once again as I begin to develop more boundaries in my writing and sharing.
But I am also more open than I have ever been. I am open to the prospect of meeting someone who will support and love me the rest of the journey. That’s what a good partner does.
So when an online dating site called Plenty of Fish offers me $20,000 to blog about finding the perfect Valentine’s Day date while promoting their business venture online, I see a financial—and possibly even a relationship—light at the end of the tunnel.
Initially, I’m told I cannot take the gig by someone at xoJane’s parent company. When Jane finally intervenes on my behalf, she turns the project around. She understands how much I need it—in more ways than one. Jane, once again, is my guardian angel.
This online dating experiment—which we end up calling “The Mandy Project”—includes the game plan for me to “test out” thirty different relationship clichés in thirty days before V-Day. These relationship adages include “Put yourself out there” (which I test out by walking around Times Square with a sandwich board that says, I’M CURRENTLY SINGLE) or “Play hard to get” (wherein I create a scavenger hunt for my beleaguered suitor).
The schedule proves to be grueling: multiple dates a night, filmed stunts, social promotion, blog entries, and lots of corporate check-ins—along with nonstop writing and editing at xoJane, not to mention freelancing I’ve taken on at TimeOut, Penthouse, and Maxim, and the recording of my weekly podcast.
Within the first two weeks, I get so sick, I can barely get out of bed.
The majority of dates are pretty fun—like the guy who takes me on a helicopter ride or the man who plays along as we have to abide by assigned first-date topics—but others are less so. One man I meet on the rooftop of the Delancey, and a few drinks in, I ask him if he’s ever been to prison. I’m totally joking.
I don’t expect his answer to be anything but “Of course not.” And then we will laugh.
“Once,” he says, with a completely straight face. “For assault with a deadly weapon.”
Trying to keep from puking on the guy as the fever I am fighting burns hot, I focus on trying to placate him instead.
“Oh well . . . I’m sure that was all a big misunderstanding,” I say cheerfully. “Hey, can you sign this release form in case I end up writing about you?”
It’s not quite the Carrie Bradshaw dream I’m being paid to make it out to be.
When I get home, in between vomiting spells, I reach out to my friend Dr. Belisa Vranich, a talented psychotherapist who is in fact the amazing friend who hooked me up with this incredibly welcome gig in the first place.
“Some of the guys are kind of sketchy,” I complain. “At this point, I’m just trying to keep my shit together to even finish the project.”
“Well,” she says, “it’s not like you have to only date guys from the website. Why don’t you meet up with a couple of men you know in real life and write about dates with them?”
“That’s a really good idea,” I say. “I never even considered it.”
So, for one of my final dates, scrambling to meet my quota of stunts, I think of possible candidates. My first thought is to reach out to a comedian named Pat Dixon, whom I met a few months earlier. We were both hanging out at a comedy club called the Stand when he approached me and said that he was a fan of mine.
“You are?” I asked.
“I am,” he said with a smile.
I don’t know much about him, but I thought he was cute and funny. Still, that usually spells out the kind of too-cool-for-school comic who will roast me on the date—and later on social media or in his stand-up act.
I tap out all the numbers to call Pat, but chicken out at the last minute and hit the X on my keypad instead. I try to think of other candidates.
I call up four platonic guy friends who I know will be safe. But the answers are all no for various reasons: “I’m married now.” “Moved to San Fran.” “Have a girlfriend; she wouldn’t like it.” “Out of town.”
Fine, I can take a sign. Besides, this isn’t the kind of magical realism justification “sign” where I try to convince myself—after being offered alcohol five times in a row, say—that I should drink. This would be a healthy risk for me, asking out a guy I like, where the only real danger is that my pride and ego might end up wounded if he mocks me afterward.
Fuck it. I’m calling him. What do I have to lose?
I already have my soul mate, after all.
Pat answers his phone after a few rings in his deep newscaster voice. “Hello?”
I talk a mile a minute when he answers.
“Hey, oh, hi Pat, yeah, it’s Mandy Stadtmiller, wasn’t sure if you have my number but yeah, I’m doing this weird paid dating promotion thing so I was wondering if I could ask you out and then write about it for the thing and I realize it’s kind of weird but don’t worry it’s like a stunt date so—”
“I’d love to,” he interrupts me.
The assurance in his voice stirs something in me I can’t quite pinpoint. It feels something like hope.
Before the date itself, I have to prepare. True to the Mandy Project thesis, on this outing I will be testing out the dating cliché of “Don’t play games.”
Ahead of time, I’ve written out a list of relationship expectations that I’m going to give him before we even have small talk on our “date”—to see how he will react.
As I joked ahead of time to one of the corporate consultants managing the Mandy Project, “This will go down in history as the two-minute date.”
I arrive a few minutes late to meet Pat at the restaurant I’ve selected, the Grey Dog, a down-home joint in my neighborhood.
When I enter the restaurant, I see Pat around the corner, sitting down at a table waiting for me.
Dressed in a trim gray suit, he embodies the antithesis of the sloppy, not-trying aesthetic so popular among performers, and when his eyes are on me, my body is on fire.
I feel attracted to the point of embarrassment. I have to look away and down and to the side. I never expect to like guys anymore. Not really like them, that is. Not look-into-their-eyes-and-feel-like-my-goddamned-heart-is-going-to-explode like them. I have never experienced this kind of chemical pull before. It feels like I am seeing someone who I have been looking for my entire life without even realizing it.
“You know this is, like, a stunt date.” I quickly try to diminish my eagerness when I sit down next to him.
“Okay,” he says with a smile. “I like your scarf, by the way.”
I touch my neck. I’m wearing a red-and-white silk scarf Belle Knox gave me as a Christmas present that I threw on at the last minute because in my dating-project-onset sickness, I fell asleep with a humidifier on my chest, and the steaming-hot water spilled on me.
“Oh, this,” I say, clutching at it. “Thanks. I’m covering up a burn.”
“Are you okay?” he asks.
/>
“Oh yeah, totally, totally,” I say, cutting him off from getting too deep into the conversation. “Listen, before we start talking like, you know, normal people, I have to ask you to read this.”
I slide over to him my fresh-from-my-printer piece of paper with a big bold title at the top that reads “Mandy’s Relationship Expectations.” My cheeks are flushed hot. Maybe this will go down in history as the two-minute date. And that means there’s ninety seconds left.
Pat picks up the paper and starts reading.
Welcome to this date with me, the note says. I want to be straightforward and let you know what all of my expectations are if we end up having a relationship together. Please take a moment to review:
1. When I feel bad, I want you to make me feel better.
2. When I am sad, I want you to comfort me and/or care.
3. You must say “I love you” first. Please note: This does not apply if you do not in actuality end up loving me.
4. I would like you to spontaneously and organically give me at least one compliment a day.
5. It is a deal breaker if you cheat on me or blatantly flirt with other women in front of me in a way that it is humiliating.
Pat is quiet as he reads the note, seemingly studying the words. I am dying as I realize this is definitely too much.
“I don’t know,” Pat says, and then a smile breaks through. “This all seems fairly reasonable.”
“Oh, thank God . . .” I say, exhaling. “It’s so weird doing this whole thing. It’s like I’ve gone from never dating to doing it so much I can barely function.”
“So, I’m curious,” Pat says. “Have you ever been in a real relationship?”
“Married once,” I say. “A few relationships after that. What about you?”