Earlier this week, I read a piece online that nearly made me want to punch out my computer screen.
It was a woman’s account of marrying a man who was in prison. He was a convicted drug dealer who had murdered another drug dealer. She was a newspaper columnist who met him in the course of her work.
It’s a truly lousy piece of writing (which is, in fact, why I haven’t mentioned the name or author; trust me, I’m doing you a favor). The words are put together serviceably enough, but it’s full of clichés and the kind of romanticism that makes 14-year-old girls so tough to be around sometimes.
But what’s worse is that it’s dishonest. The author, who divorced the man 18 months after he got out of the House of Many Doors – he was “depressed,” but she goes into little detail about why the marriage fell apart – shows a lack of self-reflection that’s truly appalling in an adult. It’s pretty obvious, as is pointed out by several highly critical readers in the letters section, that the woman was drawn to the man by some serious self-esteem issues. Some accuse her of being simply stupid, but I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt there; smart people can do stupid things.
It’s the Harlequin Romance tone of the thing that makes it so hard to wade through. The whole it-was-me-and-my-convict-lover-against-the-world thing might be a lovely fantasy to some people, but anybody with half a brain knows that Harlequin Romances are fiction and people usually are in prison for a good reason. There just aren’t that many truly misunderstood souls doing time for depriving another of life.
The author of the piece is far from an unusual case, by the way. There are whole websites devoted to making friends with prison inmates (some of them aimed at men and featuring women). There are a lot of women out there who have had so many awful experiences with men that they’re willing to take a chance on a jailbird. What drives such women is deeply sad, but it’s also deeply self-destructive. There comes a point at which sympathy for them is wasted.
With some women, it approaches pathology. Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker” who was one of the most vicious serial killers ever, is besieged by love letters. This is a guy whose very picture makes your flesh crawl, but apparently some of the gals like that feeling or something.
It’s not just women, either. One of the more embarrassing incidents in the writer Norman Mailer’s life was when he played a role in getting Jack Henry Abbott, who’d written a book about being in prison for murder, paroled. Six weeks after Abbott got out, he killed another person and went back to prison for manslaughter, committing suicide in his cell 11 years later. At least Mailer had the grace to later admit he’d made a pretty big mistake.
For many prison wives though – and I’m talking about women who marry the guy while he’s doing time – their motives are a stew of immaturity and pathology. I mean, think of it: Why would you marry a person you’d have no chance of being with most of the time, for years if not a lifetime? What is the point of getting married? It’s not even like a lot of these guys have piles of money. When’s the last time you heard about some bimbo cruising the prison yard for a sugar daddy?
Ah, but then there’s that whole romance thing. A woman who marries a prison inmate can tell the world he’s misunderstood by everybody but her. She can say he’s really innocent (spend some time around prisoners and you find out there are no guilty people in jail, much less prison) and was railroaded by an evil, corrupt system. She can tell herself that even if she’s had a life you wouldn’t want to lead on a leash, she’s a wonderful, caring, giving person who was just enough of a romantic to gather into her arms the puppy nobody wanted. Never mind that puppy killed somebody. Details? Moral judgments? Pffft.
Now, romance is a lovely thing. One of the best things about being newly in love is the romance of it all, the feeling that something special is happening. If you’re really lucky, it’s a feeling you’re experiencing for the first time.
But there are bad people that play on that. It’s not just prisoners; heedless romance is what makes the wedding industry the biggest racket outside of loan-sharking. But prison inmates for whom manipulation is a survival skill know that romance can be nothing more than another tool on their belt. And some women are so hurt or so damaged or so blind that they don’t even see the toolbelt, much less the tool.
They forget one crucial thing: Romance is buying that puppy. Love is being willing to clean up the yard after the puppy’s been outside. And sometimes, that puppy can make such a mess of the yard that you’re never going to clean it up.