“Why do you think your pictures are any good.” It was a demand, not a question.
“You want me to quantify why I think my work is any good?” I said. He was so up his own ass, this guy.
“This is not a fashion picture,” he said.
“I never said it was.”
And that was that.
We never did work together, which is fine by me—this is the guy who ended up being partially responsible for the photo of eighteen-year-old Kylie Jenner bare-assed in bondage gear in a wheelchair.
I don’t want to forget the many badass, talented male photographers, specifically Mario Sorrenti and Glen Luchford, who whilst photographing me were gracious enough to put up with my endless questioning about everything from film speeds to lighting to photo editing software in my quest to learn as much as I could. They taught me so much and gave me huge encouragement and guidance on my path to actualizing my desire to be a professional photographer.
Because I’ve been highly sexualized—and, in all fairness, I sexualized myself, too—with my photography I was committed to showing another side of women, one that allowed for sensuality but also portrayed them as beautiful and strong.
My years of interviewing people on live TV served me well as a photographer. I could connect with my subjects quickly and in an authentic way, and through that connection achieve an intimate moment and image. From years of being the subject of the picture, I knew how to handle people who were in front of my camera, and it showed in my work.
My subjects felt my intention whether they realized it or not. They saw I was not there to exploit them, to tell a story about them I’d already written in my head. My approach was, and is, “Who are you? I just want to see who you really are.”
After years, and I mean over five years, of trudging along, my career started to grow. I began to shoot for publications like Vanity Fair, Elle, Allure, and the New York Times. Eventually, I became the youngest woman ever to shoot a Vogue cover and in 2005 published a book of some of my favorite pictures from my life, called Rare Birds.
But my photography career is still not what I know it can be, and not because my work isn’t strong enough, but simply because it just got too hard to keep fighting for work in an industry that is not set up for females to succeed.
I’m still shooting pictures, although my time is taken up with other jobs that also don’t suck. (More about those later.) I have learned, often the hard way, that it’s possible to apply your life experiences—even traumatic ones—into work you don’t just like, but love. The kind of work you’re excited to do when you wake up in the morning. You must remember this: No matter how bad it looks and no matter how awful it is at the time, no matter what you’ve been through, there will come a time when you will be able to use that experience for something positive. Because of my life experiences, I’ve been given the gift of insight and empathy, allowing me to connect with people from the heart. I can listen to them, and I can hear them. I am able to see the beauty and the humanity in the person in front of me. That is one of the many blessings of everything I’ve lived through and one of the reasons I’m able to interview people in the depth that I do.
3.
Love, Obsession, and How to Tell the Difference
I have always known that if anything would kill me, it would be boys.
While I was blessed with outrageous luck in many areas, this is my weak point, my Achilles’ heel, my cross to bear. And if you’re surprised to hear that, here is a little story for you.
I must stop checking my messages. I dialed my own number and listened to my voice, a voice that hid my desperation. I sounded calm and assured. “Hi, this is Amanda, please leave a message, thank you.”
What it really should have said was “Hi, this is Amanda. If you’re not the boy I am obsessed with, don’t waste my goddamn time by leaving a message. Just hang up because I’ll never call you back if you aren’t HIM.”
This has been the story of my life since I was a little girl. I’ve spent God knows how many hours waiting for whatever HIM of the moment to make me feel okay, to grant me some peace of mind, or even to just break up with me and make the torture end.
When I think back on my life experiences, it’s always through the lens of my relationships with men. Each one a chapter. In the same way music or fashion mark a moment in one’s life, the objects of my obsession annotate the years for me.
Starting with Rob, who was my first kiss, age fourteen. Augustine I lost my virginity to, age fifteen. I still can’t believe my first time was with a dude called Augustine. He played bass in the school band and thus started my habit of dating boys in bands.
There were a few guys in the two years between Augustine, the school-band bass player, and John, the bass player in Duran Duran who became my first husband.
There were guys who, the moment I met them, I knew would break my heart. Each and every time something inside warned me, “Run away while you still can!” But it’s just not my nature to say no to some dangerous intrigue, and life would be so boring if I always played it safe.
Which brings me back to that moment. Checking my messages obsessively, waiting for the phone to ring. This particular boy in a band was on tour on the other side of the country. The after show party, the whiskey, the coke . . . and I’m still expecting him to call. I believed that with enough focus I could will that phone to ring and, by the sheer power of my fantasy, everything would be okay.
Then the phone rang, validating my delusional sense of self. I’ve willed a miracle.
The moment he said “hey” I felt my heart booming in my chest. I could tell by his tone that I didn’t want to hear what he had to say.
“I have something to tell you. You’re not going to be very pleased with me, but I have to tell you the truth. I slept with someone else last night. Actually two someone elses. I’m really sorry.”
Nausea hit me hard. I tried to catch my breath before the tears overwhelmed me.
“Why did you do that?” I asked pathetically.
“I just wanted to, it was something I wanted to do.”
“Didn’t you think about how this would affect me?”
“Well, yes, but I wanted to do it anyway.”
“You are such a cunt.”
“I’m sorry, but you should still come to New York, you can stay with me if you want, we just shouldn’t date anymore.”
I hurled my cell phone hard against the wall.
What kind of low-self-esteem girl did he think I was? I can still come and stay with him, just as “friends.” What a jerk.
After I was done howling, I retrieved my mildy damaged phone (those protective covers DO come in handy), held it up to my ear to make sure it still worked, and booked the first available direct flight to New York.
A sad, but true fact.
On my way to the airport, I asked the driver to pull over at the 7-Eleven so I could buy a pack of cigarettes and break my firm no-smoking rule. I smoked the whole way to LAX between fits of hysterical sobbing. Having made it onto the plane, I curled up beneath a thin polyester airline blanket and cried during the entire flight.
My mind obsessively played out the confrontation I was about to have.
I considered which approach I should take—angry girl, hurt girl, crying girl, or maybe “you can’t hurt me because I never really cared” girl?
When I wasn’t plotting my strategy, I was berating myself. What in the hell was wrong with me?
Why was I flying across the country?
So that I could be crushed in person?
No girl with any self-esteem would be on this plane right now. From beneath my blanket, I heard a voice say: “Miss, are you okay?”
I poked my head out, tears streaming down my face.
“Actually, no . . . I’m not okay. My boyfriend just cheated on me with not one but two girls and . . . I’m on my way to see him.” The flight attendant looked at me with pity, and I stuck my head back into the blanket cave and continued to
weep.
After what seemed like an eternity, the plane landed. I gathered my scattered belongings and walked through JFK looking for a ladies’ bathroom. After all, I had to look as good as I could, then maybe he would realize what a mistake he’d made, right?
But just thinking about my predicament made me start to cry again. My carefully applied makeup began to run, leaving big black streaks down my face. A desirable look at one time, but not exactly the look I’d hoped for at this moment.
I took a cab to his place, a shitty fifth-floor walk-up in the East Village, which he shared with his coke fiend of a roommate, who also had a passion for fucking super curvy girls preferably in pairs, which seemed to be a theme in this friend group. I had been dating the guy for three months, and this was the first time I’d been to his apartment. He’d said it was a dump and he was embarrassed for me to see it. Rightly so, by the way. Calling it a dump was an understatement.
I stared out the cab window at the passing New York sights. I was exhausted, all cried out. I’d just flown across the country, yet again powered by my unquenchable obsession to be loved and desired.
Does this story sound familiar at all and make you feel just a little bit queasy?
Worry not, as most of us have, at some point, been completely and utterly obsessed with another person, and been convinced it was love. How could a feeling so powerful, one that made your heart pound so hard and your vagina feel so alive, and that consumed your every waking moment, be anything but love?
I hate to be the one to break the bad news, but you know that feeling as if you’ve lost your mind over a lover, as if being with them is better than the best drug you’ve ever taken, as if you won’t survive without them? That isn’t regular old love. It’s love with a little something extra, commonly known as Love Addiction.
If you’re a woman, you likely already have to battle against the “crazy girlfriend” stereotype, so admitting that you are love addicted is not easy. There’s some major shame around it, but rest assured that many women I know have experienced it. I’d argue that love addiction is at least as common as alcoholism and often hides behind other addictions so it can be harder to spot. And to anyone who thinks the term love addiction is just some stupid pseudotherapeutic lingo—I’m here to tell you it is very real and has beaten my ass to a bloody pulp too many times to remember.
What does love addiction feel like? For me it’s a viselike grip of making someone else my everything. There’s a fine line between passion and obsession. When you’re in addict mode, you’re obsessive and truly not in your right mind. You think about your “beloved” all the time, ruminating on ways to get them to love you as much as you love them and to stay with you forever. Your entire life revolves around this “love,” and you feel as if you literally could not live without that person.
Why do so many women find themselves love addicted?
Here’s my theory: Think about the fairy tales so many of us grew up with. Until Prince Charming shows up and makes out with an unconscious and unconsenting Sleeping Beauty, she’s not even awake. In virtually every film marketed to kids, there’s some sort of flirtation or love interest or crush or unrequited love between the male and female leads. And it’s generally the girl who’s dreaming and scheming about how to make the boy notice her and fall in love with her, not the other way around. From a young age we’re programmed to view this behavior as “romantic” when in fact “codependent” is a more realistic description.
An author whose books I love, biological anthropologist Helen Fisher has found in her own extensive research that what we often think of as romantic love is in fact an addiction that forms around attachment issues. Meaning: if you grew up with caretakers who were not present, you will constantly be seeking a deep and sincere connection to fulfill your unmet childhood attachment need.
And sorry to say, if your primary caretakers were in a dysfunctional relationship, that relationship is likely your model for love relationships, and every time you meet someone who reminds you of what you grew up with, that’s the person you’ll go for.
In my case, there were many boxes easily ticked.
I had the perfect childhood for some major dysfunction in the love department.
Some other telltale signs are as follows:
Are you a people pleaser?
Are you always trying to be on your best behavior or presenting a false self that you hope will earn you love?
Are you desperate to have someone you’re attracted to pay attention to you, just so you’re sure you exist?
Do you heap love and attention on people who might not deserve it?
YES, YES, YES, and YES.
From the time I was a teenager and well into my thirties, I only loved the boys who mistreated me; if any boy was too nice to me, I ran in the other direction.
I just did not get a lady boner for nice people.
I sometimes joke that my love obsession inspired my becoming a professional photographer. I had a lover whom I was in obsession with. We lived in different cities, and I desperately needed an excuse to be with him in NYC, which was where he lived. I’d work my ass off to land a gig in New York just so I could say, “Oh, I’m going to be there shooting.” Being in the same place as your love obsession by “coincidence”—textbook love-addict behavior. The only upside to this kind of acting out is that I racked up a shitload of air miles visiting all the cities I coincidentally appeared in.
Love addiction has been severely exacerbated in the digital age. Social media is a major love-obsession enabler, allowing you to hunt your love obsession down detectivelike on various social platforms. One of the tricks of being a good love addict is to enable the “Find My Friends” function on your love obsession’s phone, allowing you to track their device and know where they are at all times. You are likely wondering how I know this inside tip.
Well, I will admit to some mortifying behavior. I have on occasion been known to check the occasional text message on his phone or take a peek at his email. When it comes to digital snooping, if there’s one piece of advice I can give, it’s this: DON’T DO IT. If you felt bad before, you’ll only feel worse after. You will always find something you wish you hadn’t, and then you’re faced with the problem of confronting him. You can hardly say “I looked at your phone and I saw that text from so-and-so. What the fuck was that all about?” or “Who is Jamie?” Now you’re stuck with incriminating information you can neither forget nor disclose. Either you risk exposing yourself as a snooper—and suffer further humiliation—or you keep it to yourself and explode with anxiety or break out in hives, which is what happened to me.
I have done both of the above, and neither is an option I would choose again in a hurry.
Love addiction has led me down some pretty dark paths, to places I would not have believed I could go. You might not think I would be the type to tolerate abuse. I’m a smart woman with choices, a career, and resources—but twice I have loved and lived with violent men, and because of my love addiction, I didn’t want to leave either of them. I share this because falling in love with a raging lover can happen to anyone; what’s important is how you respond to it. Some of the most beautiful, talented, intelligent, creative, kind, loving women I know have been unable to overcome their love addiction enough to leave abusive relationships.
I was barely a teenager during my first obsessive and abusive relationship. It was with a dude who drank daily, hit me, and only fucked me from behind with my face in the pillow. Turns out he only dated men after me, but that’s another story. One night he waited until I was in bed, naked and asleep, to start a drunken fight about something I’ve long since forgotten. It ended with him ripping the railings off the staircase and barricading me in the bedroom. My only escape was out the second-floor window. I grabbed my cell phone, a T-shirt, and my underwear and climbed down the drainpipe on the front of the building, where I hid in a trash can for hours, freezing cold, until I could reach a friend to come and bring me to safety.
Guess what?
You would think that this was the last of him.
But I didn’t leave.
I went back one more time because he told me he loved me, and I wanted to believe him; if that isn’t love addiction, I don’t know what is.
Eight years later it happened again. I fell in love with a man who appeared to be nothing like the angry boyfriend from my teen years. Be forewarned—a wolf in sheep’s clothing can be very desirable, especially one who is a famous, ridiculously handsome older man. But despair and depression hounded this particular guy. He would sit and meditate for two hours a day, maybe to try to calm his internal rage. Yet he tried to strangle me when I was in the bath, because he’d gone to the trouble of making dinner and was upset that I didn’t come to eat it fast enough. It took me three years to leave that guy. There were police visits, concealer-covered bruises from closed-fist punches to the face, and too many nights spent sleeping on the couches of friends after fleeing his abuse in the early hours of the morning. My shame and embarrassment couldn’t have been any greater.
So why would I stay in such detrimental relationships?
Why does anyone?
I stayed because I didn’t believe I was lovable.
I stayed because I didn’t believe I deserved better.
I stayed because I didn’t believe that anyone would ever love me again.
Instead, I believed that I’d be alone my whole life if I let go of this guy. It was like Stockholm syndrome, but the love-addict version.
My friends eventually despaired of me. How many times could they implore me to care about myself? How many times could they reassure me that I was a great person, a loving and generous friend deserving of genuine love, the kind that builds you up, supports you, helps you to be your best self? The truth is that before being able to accept real love, you’ve got to get some self-love flowing. It doesn’t matter how many people claim to adore you, or how fit, successful, smart, talented, funny, kind, or compassionate you are. None of it matters if YOU don’t see and cherish your own wonderful self, and back then I certainly didn’t.
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