Unwifeable

by Mandy Stadtmiller

  “Married twice,” he says. “And one woman tried to murder me.”

  I laugh out loud.

  “No, seriously,” he says.

  “Wow,” I say. “Seriously? You might have more red flags than I do.”

  Offhandedly, I mention to him that dating has changed since I got sober a few years ago.

  “You too?” he asks. “This April it’ll be fifteen years without a drink.”

  Synchronicity. I did not expect this. I veer into my dump of inappropriate background information.

  “I was crazy when I drank,” I say. “So, how many guys do you think I’ve had sex with?”

  Pat jokes, “I don’t know, like a hundred?”

  “Oh my God, no!” I say, and then, without thinking too much about it, I blurt out, “I mean, I’ve probably sucked a hundred dicks.”

  The sentence just hangs there. There is no taking it back. I sit there, flushed, recoiling in quiet horror at myself. Okay, maybe this won’t be the two-minute date. Maybe it’ll be the two-minute-and-two-hour date.

  “You have great stories,” Pat says, not taking the bait. “You know, I’ve always been a fan of your writing.”

  He doesn’t respond with lewdness, but instead offers . . . respect.

  That’s about the last thing I expected. There is no trace of judgment or leering dismissal. He treats me like a peer.

  We are quiet for a while, and then he says, “You’re a lot sweeter than I expected.”

  “I am?”

  “You are.”

  As I’m talking, without realizing it, I am nervously ripping the napkin in front of me to shreds, and little bits of detritus are covering the table, my food, everything.

  Without a word, Pat removes the napkin from my hands and sets it aside. He places his hands on mine, holding them with gentleness and warmth.

  I stop talking. What is this sensation flooding my body? I feel giddy. High.

  “Jesus,” I say. “I feel like I’m in the seventh grade.”

  This guy makes me want to drop all of the bravado I’m wearing like a costume on Halloween. Even if it makes me look like a fool, I know I need to communicate what I’m experiencing inside right now. Because I haven’t felt something like this in a long time.

  “Listen,” I tell him hurriedly, “I know I come across kind of . . . strange. But I feel like I should tell you . . . I would date you.”

  The urgent rush of sincerity is embarrassing. Like I just wet my pants right there at the table.

  “Thank you,” he says, his face softening. “I’m glad you told me that.”

  We walk back to my apartment because I tell him I need to get a photo to write about the date—and I’ve forgotten to bring the photo release form with me.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I realize this whole thing is so weird.”

  We enter my tiny studio, and he looks around to take in the view.

  I’ve “decorated” the place with a pile of clothes in one corner and an unwieldy stack of letters, packages, and assignments in another.

  Most of the place is inherited from the girl who lived here before me, and it shows. A green suede headboard hints at a cute frilly girliness that I have never embodied as a single woman. You can even see the slats in the wall where she once displayed her vast hanging high-heel collection. The pièce de résistance, however, was her framed wedding announcement next to the sparkly stiletto-heel trinket she had hanging on the door.

  This studio was her true-to-life Sex and the City paradise, and I’ve tarnished her tradition by filling it with wrinkly clothes, a paltry kitten-heel collection, ungodly stacks of reporter’s notebooks, and the near certainty I will never achieve her endgame.

  “What do you think?” I ask Pat.

  He looks around at the disarray and says, “All your place needs is a woman’s touch.”

  I laugh, and Pat walks over to the side of my bed, next to the scratched-up black desk I also inherited. Atop my desk is a side-by-side display: an unwashed Bullet vibrator, a half-empty plastic carton of orange juice, and ten gold and silver plastic boxes of “S&M kits” a publicist has sent me. Pat sidles over to the assortment, and, as if making his choice in a Showcase Showdown, lifts up the orange juice and takes a swig.

  His total authority over my apartment turns me on. I hand him the release form to sign, and then we go out into my stairwell to snap a photo for the blog entry I have to write. I extend my iPhone to capture the moment, and Pat puts his arm around me—then turns to give me the best kiss I’ve ever received.

  It feels like a slo-mo sequence of chemical reactions, from excitement to lust to a little bit of fear.

  “Do you want to come inside for a little bit?” I ask.

  When we sit on my bed making awkward small talk, Pat encircles his fingers around the Belle Knox scarf and plays with it for half a second. When she gifted it to me, Belle wrote on her card, “Hopefully, you can use this for something dirty and fun.”

  Belle Knox gets her wish.

  Pat pulls the scarf toward him and kisses me again in a way that is slow, deliberate, and done with a confidence I haven’t experienced in a lifetime of kisses.

  We fool around for a few more hours—but don’t have sex—and as he gets up to leave, I expect this will be the last time I ever see the guy.

  “I like you,” he says before heading out the door. “I want to see you again soon.”

  “You do?” I ask.

  “I really do.”

  * * *

  WE DON’T HAVE sex until a few dates later, because I’m trying to incorporate the lessons from mistakes I’ve made in the past. When we do, there is a physical connection that feels like something swallowing me whole.

  Maybe because we’re both sober. Maybe because we’re both aware of every breath and kiss and move we’re taking. There is nothing more intoxicating than total awareness of every little thing going down.

  Pat is the only man I’ve ever been with who can quickly go from kinky to tender to completely psychological—without ever missing a beat. It’s like Sexual Mad Libs, and possibly constitutes the only way that monogamous sex does not get boring.

  If there are any people in relationships looking to spice up their sex lives who are reading this, please, if your partner is into it, go nuts when you do the dirty talk. It is the most freeing experience in the world. It’s like Disneyland every night in the bedroom. I don’t know why it’s so freeing—but there’s this level of trust involved that is absolutely narcotic. It’s like a fucking Scientology audit.

  That fun carnality is made all the more precious because he is also one of the kindest, most thoughtful men I’ve dated.

  One day I mention to him how alienating it can feel when you are becoming close with someone new. I tell him how I wish he could just immediately know everything that one of my best childhood friends might know—like, say, the name of my first cat I had when I was a kid. The next day, Pat texts me.

  “What was your first cat’s name?”

  “Rags,” I text back, with a huge grin on my face.

  We are so close, so fast. Which means we are also contending with our newfound status of “being in a relationship.” Neither of us really expected it, and sometimes our resentments bubble up out of nowhere and take on a much heavier weight.

  One hot day in Bryant Park after one month of dating, he talks about the black-or-white pressures he feels bearing down on him.

  “Sometimes it feels like it’s all or nothing if we fight about something,” he says. “It’s this idea that we’re together forever or nothing.”

  “What are you saying?” I begin, already feeling the anxiety and the anger rising inside me, beginning to strangle any sense of reason or calm. “Because I don’t need this, you know. I’ve done just fine on my own.”

  “Stop with that bullshit bravado, Mandy,” Pat says. “We’re past that.”

  “It’s not bullshit,” I say, even more defensively. “I’d rather die alone than spend a minute wi
th someone who doesn’t want to be with me. You owe me fucking nothing.”

  While I am in theory sober, my actions are incredibly unsober.

  I’m not going to meetings. I’m not seeing a therapist, because I’m trying to save money. And my professional life is falling apart. At xoJane, layoffs have just been announced—and I’m a casualty. I feel unmoored, and the stakes for every little decision seem insanely high.

  In fact, all of our fighting stems from a conversation started about how I am up for a full-time features editor position at Mashable, which would mean editing a features section that does not generate much passion within me, but which would be the safe choice. When I prepared for the final round of interviews, I showed Pat what life might be like, with my sample story idea lists: Ten different recipes for broccoli that will blow your mind. Why this season’s caftan will change your life. Seven belly-busters that will change the way you think about cellulite.

  Instead of taking that job, I decide to look for every possible angle to figure out how I can dodge the corporate route and have more freedom.

  “Maybe we could move in together,” I suggested earlier before our fight began. “Then I wouldn’t have to worry about money so much, you know . . .”

  I wasn’t really serious when I said it. Okay, I guess I was kind of serious. I was spitballing. Hey, at least I didn’t register him a domain name. I shouldn’t have said anything. I know that. In fact, I feel shame about having said anything, but now it’s out there, and I can’t take it back. I’m angry at myself, and I can feel myself directing the anger at him as he begins to speak.

  “I care for you so much,” Pat says now. “But we haven’t built the foundation for the metaphorical house we would live in—for a relationship. I want the stakes to be lower, rather than living in a house with no ceiling or walls, just posts and beams with holes in the ground.”

  Pat tells me he met his second wife a month after his divorce—and moved in with her, and stayed in that relationship for years because he did not take it slow enough. He doesn’t want the same thing to happen with me. This is too important, he says.

  “You’re a camper,” he says. “You want to set up camp. I want to keep what we have intact and see where this goes.”

  Now, I am in full-on autopilot mode, defensive and enraged at just the smallest whiff of rejection.

  “Everything you’re talking about,” I say, “makes me feel like I’m complicit in your fucking entrapment or something.”

  My words are violence. Fuck this. Fuck that. Fuck you. Fuck everyone.

  After having begun the best relationship with someone I’ve ever had, I now feel wildly offended at the notion he might want to go slow to preserve what we’re in the process of creating.

  So I end it. The hesitation and concern and very logical resistance in his voice feel too painful. They sting me, and my pride kicks in.

  “I don’t want to be a burden,” I tell him, even though he never once said that I was a burden. “Thank you for the best four weeks of my life.”

  “This is your decision,” he says. “I don’t understand it, but I can respect it if that’s what you want.”

  I don’t even listen to him. I shut him out and walk away. I am okay being single forever. Because I am in control. I am the one crashing the plane—no one else.

  * * *

  I EMAIL SEVERAL girlfriends and my sister a rendition of breaking up with Pat. Then I call my parents. They all start giving me feedback I am not prepared to hear.

  “I think you’re ruining a good thing.” “He actually seems really emotionally intelligent and like he knows how to deal with some of your shit.” “Why are you doing this, dude?”

  Then my sister calls me and speaks to me in the straight, no-nonsense way for which she is famous.

  “Hey, Mandy,” she says bluntly. “This reminds me of when Mom said to Dad, ‘I think I might want to get divorced,’ and then Dad was pissed, so he got divorced. Remember that?”

  Of course I remember. Against all odds, my parents went on to remarry five years later and have been together since. But my mom acted impulsively. She acted out of rage. Then my father did the same. Shit blew up. Is that the kind of behavior I want to model in my own life?

  My sister’s insight lands in a way nothing else does.

  Examining where I’ve veered off course is so uncomfortable for me. It is for everyone, I suppose. It requires a level of personal accountability in admitting that you are wrong—and practicing what my therapist calls the art of “defenselessness.”

  “Okay, I’m going to call him,” I tell my sister. “I hope it isn’t too late.”

  “Good luck,” she says. “Don’t fuck it up.”

  It’s near the end of the night, and I broke things off about six hours before. Pat picks up my FaceTime call after a few rings, and the look on his face is one of amusement.

  “Hello,” he says. “You’re the last person I expected to hear from.”

  “I screwed everything up,” I say. “I’m so sorry. I just shut things down because I was scared that you would reject me so I wanted to do it first.”

  “Why?” he asks, seeming tentative.

  “I don’t know,” I say. “It’s like there’s one part of me that wants to be open and vulnerable to love, and then there’s another part that’s all about self-preservation and survival—and I just want to run from anything that might end up hurting me. Or hurt the other person first.”

  Pat is quiet, and then suggests a solution.

  “What if we came up with two different names for those two different parts of yourself?” he asks. “We could call one ‘Deborah.’ And the other ‘Shithead.’ ”

  I laugh out loud, and it reminds me of the level of joy this guy provides me. He is dark and irreverent, yet I can feel his honesty and openheartedness in the way we communicate. He can make a joke and then follow it up with an insight that speaks to a psychological vocabulary that surpasses my own.

  “So,” he says, “what can we do so this doesn’t happen again?”

  “I’m going to . . .” I stall, not wanting to commit to what I know I need to do. “Okay, I’m going to go to my therapist and AA meetings.”

  Pat’s face melts into a smile.

  “Good,” he says. “That makes me really happy.”

  He sees me. He forces me to talk about my feelings.

  It is a strange thing. So much of this relationship is strange—in the best sense of the word. It is some manifestation of years of work I have done on myself to heal that little girl inside who was her worst enemy in re-creating the chaos with which I was so acquainted. Those twisted familiar patterns that felt like “home” are now being redefined. Maybe home can be a safe place with someone whom I can trust and love and count on.

  “Why am I so fucked-up?” I ask him, annoyed at my broken lizard brain, including all of the dark and disturbing sexual scenarios it frequently conjurs.

  “You know what the most insane, crazy scenario might be for you, Mandy? A man who is madly in love with you and adores you and thinks you’re the love of his life.”

  “Jesus Christ,” I say. “I think you’re right.”

  Seeing myself get past my natural inclination to self-sabotage as a form of protection is no small triumph. It feels like a miracle.

  * * *

  AFTER SIX WEEKS together—and two weeks after my aborted breakup attempt—we start calling each other boyfriend and girlfriend.

  And now I am watching my boyfriend perform onstage. It’s a slightly harrowing experience.

  “My first two wives were both virgins,” Pat is telling the audience as I sit hidden in the back row after asking to tag along. “I guess it seemed honorable, a girl saving her sex for marriage.”

  Inside Dangerfield’s, the comedy club where he is performing, the dim lighting and red-glass-lit tables create the effect of a Mad Men dive bar. There are about twenty-five people in the audience, tittering and shifting nervously as he holds c
ourt. He pauses to look into the eyes of the audience.

  “After two divorces, I’m kind of saving my next marriage for a girl who really likes to fuck.”

  He smirks at me when he says that, and I squirm in my seat like he’s just seen through me with X-ray vision. When I took some friends from the Post to see Pat, he did one of his jokes about how he’ll never get married again, and city editor Michelle Gotthelf whispered to me, “Too bad.”

  So I don’t take this joke about his “next marriage” seriously at all. Besides, I’ve ruled that out for myself. I am a realist at heart, and now I’m just enjoying the ride.

  “The girl I’m dating right now,” Pat tells the audience, “told me she sucked a hundred dicks.”

  What the . . .

  I spit out my Diet Coke. It takes a lot to scandalize me, but here we are.

  “Does that seem high to you?” he asks. “How many dicks is a woman supposed to suck? I don’t know. She’s almost forty, she started ‘dating’ at fifteen. After twenty-five years of dating, that’s about four dicks a year. That’s not bad. It’s one dick, quarterly. A lot of small-business owners would be grateful for that option.”

  I’m laughing and burying my face in the table. The waiter brings me another soda and smiles.

  “My first wife, she was my high school sweetheart,” Pat tells the crowd. “You marry your high school sweetheart, it’s like you’ve said, ‘You know what—I’ve looked all over the school.’ ”

  Pat is unlike any man I’ve ever dated before. He doesn’t give a shit. Doesn’t want to impress (or even offend) the right people. Doesn’t want to glad-hand those in the right circles. Doesn’t want to kiss the ass of the world as a whole. It’s scary to date someone who has less to lose than you do, but that’s what’s unfolding here, and I realize that every minute I spend with the guy.

  Then he moves on to the story he mentioned on our first date.

  “I had a woman try to murder me at an IHOP,” he tells the crowd. “It’s true. It’s a one hundred percent true story, which I’m opening up to share with you tonight. When I tell women that a woman tried to murder me at an IHOP, they all have the same question. Do you know what it is?”