“What’s this thing you do, where it’s like you’re doing a show?” This guy stares daggers through my bullshit. We have been on a few dates before, but I can tell already, he isn’t like all the others. Summoning my favorite seduction trick from my well-worn repertoire, I make my voice as breathy and helpless as possible, asking, “Do you want me to touch myself?” He’s tall, dark-humored, and handsome, and I first begin seeing him after receiving $20,000 from an online dating site to meet as many men as possible-all while driving up website traffic. I am lying perfectly still on a hand-me-down bed in Manhattan, desiring nothing more than to please a mysterious 45-year-old man I barely know. It is early 2015, and my favorite escape-the-moment drug of choice is sex. It’s a tricky endeavor-even for the bravest among us. No matter what unsettling evidence emerges as all the ugly secrets start inevitably spilling out, you must resolve to never give up. That’s the problem with any emotional investigation: You need an unwavering focus in the face of overwhelming shame and regret and distraction. All to avoid confronting the most devastating moments of original impact or having to assume personal responsibility for my failures along the way to correct course. An unrelenting influx of more pressing cases. Instigating sexual chaos provided me with the perfect excuse for my inability to save myself or learn from past mistakes. I was a living don’t, and I was okay with that. My warp-speed career in personal memoir I claimed to be the ultimate act: making myself as terrifying to men as possible. I wasn’t just a self-destructive exhibitionist whose crippling neuroses manifested in navel-gazing narcissism and random acts of implosion. Well, the vague empowerment narrative of it, anyway. I’ve behaved terribly, predictably, and embarrassingly-and most shameless of all, I wrote about the journey in the New York Post and on xoJane with such an excruciating lack of self-awareness I finally had to reconcile the fact that there might be no one out there left for me at all.

My black box is horrific-even by black-box standards.

Unwifeable mandy stadtmiller