The One

Mandy’s greatest failure is self-delusion. Terrified of never having children, she deceives herself into believing a soulmate and children will make her whole. She creates the fantasy of a perfect husband and perfect child provided by Match Your DNA, and she feels a sense of possessiveness and entitlement over these imagined relationships. She is prepared to break up someone else’s marriage to be with her Match, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that her husband did the same to her. That same sense of entitlement combines with her desire for connection, and she fabricates an incident wherein Richard saved her life.

Driven by emotion, she fails to think critically or to recognize Pat and Chloe’s manipulation. Deprived of the soulmate she expected, she allows herself to be sucked into this new family, who play into her delusion. She estranges herself from her own family when they refuse to invest in her fantasy, and only when she meets Richard’s ex-girlfriend, Michelle, does Mandy confront reality. She initially searches for logical reasons why Michelle’s perception of Richard differs so much from his mother and sister’s report. The last straw is when Michelle reveals that Richard is not dead. Pat and Chloe explicitly claimed that Richard died in his accident, and they even showed Mandy where his ashes were supposedly scattered.