Women who marry men in prison

Women married to men behind bars. What do we know about them?Almost nothing.What do we think we know? That they are deranged women attracted to psychopaths. Pitiful, lonely women looking for love in all the wrong places. Damaged women. Control-freak women. Drama-queen women. Women with messiah complexes.Or, they are saintly, self-sacrificing, celibate women who give it all up to stand by their men.In other words: We pathologize women who choose to marry men behind bars, and we worship women who have stayed married to their incarcerated husbands.Like all stereotypes, these “types” reflect bits of truth, much exaggeration, and a lot of ignorance. In fact, the reasons women marry/stay married to men behind bars are as diverse, quirky, open-hearted, misguided, optimistic, rational, irrational, well considered and impulsive as the reasons women marry/ stay married to men in the free world.In this mostly hidden subculture of women married to men behind bars, there are MBIs (those who were Married Before Incarceration) and MWIs (those who got Married While Incarcerated). What modest attention is paid to these many hundreds of thousands of women is primarily focused on MWIs--and that attention is focused on what’s wrong with these women. How could they? Why would they?There are those said to suffer from hybristophilia, a mental condition where someone—most always a woman—is obsessively attracted to (gets intense sexual arousal from) a man who’s committed notorious crimes. Yes, it is real thing, documented. The more heinous the crime, the more likely an inmate is to receive “fan mail” (and marriage proposals) from women.There are women who were victims of abuse and mistreatment by fathers, previous husbands, boyfriends. These women, so the logic goes, figure that if they’re in a relationship with a man in prison, he’s not going to hurt them. He can't hurt them. Unlike in their past relationships, they are safe.Or there are MWI women who are calculating manipulators on a power trip. They hold all the cards. The guy is dependent on them for news of the outside, for money contributed to the canteen account, for human kindness—all of which they can dispense, or not, at will.Or, folks, how about this: Many women who marry incarcerated men fall in love with them. That’s right. Love. Intellectual, emotional, spiritual bonding. The sharing of ideas and stories, beliefs, hopes and dreams. Humor, sadness, random observations. You know...the stuff of life. The sociologist Megan Comfort interviewed dozens of women married or involved with inmates, and she found—contrary to what we think we know--that they were not attracted to the “bad boy,” not attracted to the thrill of risky choices, but rather quite the opposite. The women she interviewed were attracted to what we would consider these men’s “feminine” qualities. The men were thoughtful and communicative. They were listeners. They were interested in establishing and nurturing a lasting emotional relationship (a sexual relationship not being possible, not now and maybe never). They were interested in finding a soul mate not a bedmate. I know two such couples. And I deeply admire their commitment to each other.These hidden worlds are masked by stereotypes. The more we know, the less likely we are to fool ourselves into thinking we know.