Is it worth falling in love with someone living on the outside when you’re in prison? Chris Dankovich describes what it feels like to have heartbreak in prison. 

If you’re in prison, a relationship with a caring, loving partner on the outside is the greatest and most desired thing you can have.

I was blessed to have one of these, but after several years, that relationship ended. Being with someone in prison can be fulfilling and loving and full of wonderful ups, but it also has powerful downs — specifically, loneliness and distance.

For someone on the outside, having a partner in prison means they are not there with you when you go out, or there with you at home. They cannot hold you except in a visiting room, cannot kiss you except once or twice per visit, and there is nothing else physical you can ever do while they’re incarcerated. God bless the women who even bother trying. Bless the women who stay even for awhile.

But a long sentence pushes most of them away. The behaviors of those in prison do as well. Those in prison usually aren’t particularly emotionally healthy, and continued gambling, drug use and talking to other women pushes even the most dedicated wife or girlfriend away.

Whatever the cause, you usually see the end coming. Your partner talks to you less. She’s more emotionally distant. Almost all of the time, the final nail is when she meets someone else, someone who can be there for them, someone who can meet her needs.

Those needs are ones you would likely never willingly go without if the situation was reversed. Usually her attention fades, though she may just disappear, cutting all contact, and you never know what happened. But that end usually happens once she’s worn down, whether you know it or not.

You go to your cell when your cellmate is gone and hide yourself from anyone who walks by while you break down. You can’t yell or weep because you can be sure that someone will try to victimize you if they see you doing this. (Two-thirds of the 100-person cellblock consists of “the wrong person.”)

So you push everything down inside of yourself and act like nothing’s wrong when you go out in the block or yard, and you try to stifle your heart climbing up your throat when that prison ally or prison frenemy asks how your girl’s doing.

You don’t blame her, or at least you shouldn’t. You ask yourself, “If the roles were reversed, how long would I be loyal to someone who I couldn’t touch, who wasn’t there at night or when I wanted to go out?” And you understand. But you don’t. But you do. But you don’t. But you do.

You want to go call her, because you just want to. You want to hear the sound of her voice. You want her to answer. You know you shouldn’t, at least not right now. But you go to the phone and start to dial the number anyway, that number you’ve dialed so many times, and you hang up as you dial the last digit. And maybe you dial again, you’re not sure why, and she picks up and is kind but it isn’t the same, there’s not that beautiful timbre that used to be reserved specially for you in her voice. She doesn’t say what you were hoping she would say even though you weren’t self-aware enough to know that you were hoping for anything.

You are in prison, so chances are you weren’t exactly perfectly in tune with your feelings before, and right now you’re as off-balance as you’ve been in a long time. She made you feel balanced when things were going well, and now that rug has been pulled out from under you. You didn’t feel incarcerated in those moments with her. Such a beautiful feeling, such a gift, such a grace. And now you’re trying to remember how to live without her, without the grace she gave. But you can’t remember how right at this moment.

Your visions for the future must completely change. You know there is a future, but right now you can’t imagine it. And you go back to your cell and cry. Even the toughest men cry when the person they truly saw as their someone leaves, but this is prison so they all hide it until years later when they finally open up about it in some group or while trying to talk some sense or game into a younger man.

Maybe she just disappears on you. About half of all prison friendships and relationships end that way. You opened up and bared your heart and soul, and eventually you overwhelmed her by dumping your problems on her. She can’t handle it or gets bored or just meets someone else who captures her attention. You can’t blame her, but you just want some acknowledgement that what you felt was real or that you actually did matter, and you likely will not get that. Maybe it wouldn’t be so grand if you had it, but, since you don’t, that is all you can think about.

You can’t move on. There’s no distraction. There is no shoulder to cry on, no one else to move on to, no fling to get your mind right again. There’s just you and what’s around you (and what’s around you is hateful and angry people). You’re stuck, and the feeling is not going to go away or diminish, probably for years.

Taylor Swift could have been talking about how it feels to go through a breakup while you’re incarcerated when she sang,

“Cause I’m right where

You left me

You left me no

You left me no choice but to stay here forever.”

(And yes, whether you’re from the hood or the country, old or young, as gangster as can be and doing a life sentence, you will listen to Taylor Swift when someone you love breaks up with you. It’s guaranteed.)

You aren’t owed anything by her or anyone else. You would just like to move on with yourself and your life, but your life feels like a shadow, and your life already felt like a shadow from being in prison. Right now you feel like the shadow of a ghost. “Here forever” doesn’t refer to your prison sentence. It refers to your state of mind while your body is dealing with your prison sentence.

All you want is for these feelings to be over. All you want is to feel those feelings again. You will likely never experience anything like what you had again for the remainder of your time in prison, which may be a few years or a few decades longer. And you cannot mourn in this place, and you cannot think of anything or anyone else.

“Eventually I got to a place where I was at peace,” said Tim, a 50-year-old former Marine whose wife stayed with him for his first five years. “I had to learn how to live all over again when she left. It was a new experience of incarceration. I cried like a baby but couldn’t let anyone see me do so. I lost myself for awhile. Went to the Hole, got in fight after fight. But eventually I found my footing.”

I asked him how long that took.

“It was four years later, but I got there eventually.”

I asked Tim about whether he would have had more peace had he been on his own from the start. “Do you regret the relationship? Was it worth it?”

“I haven’t talked to my ex-wife in a decade, and I came close to giving up when she left. Would I have been able to stay more balanced back then without her? I don’t know. Maybe. Breaking up in here was the hardest thing I’ve ever been through. And still, our time together was the best thing that ever happened to me. I wonder if she thinks of me as anything other than a mistake. Yet I will love her forever, no matter what.”

His feelings match my own exactly.

Chris Dankovich #595904
Thumb Correctional Facility
3225 John Conley Drive
Lapeer, MI 48446

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