Love in Prison

When the man I loved was summoned to prison to begin serving his sentence, I experienced helplessness for the first time in my life. I was in my twenties, old enough to have learned confidence, young enough to still believe that desire carried leverage. Until then, even my most distant wishes had felt negotiable—things that could be approached indirectly through planning, persistence, and effort. Wanting had always come with a sense of agency. This did not.

For the first time, I wanted something completely, without reserve, and there was nothing I could do to make it happen. No plan to revise. No angle to consider. No appeal to file. It felt less like loss than like a sudden exposure—to the limits of effort, to the fact that not all outcomes respond to will. It was as though I had reached a point where that belief finally collapsed: wanting does not always lead to having.

He was a civil activist. When we met a few months earlier, he was free on bail, waiting for the outcome of his appeal. His life existed in a provisional tense, bracketed by legal language. Because of the uncertainty surrounding him, I tried—consciously, deliberately—to keep myself from becoming attached.

But there are parts of us that do not obey reason.

I couldn’t accept walking away from someone whose character, way of thinking, and moral concerns aligned so closely with mine simply because he might spend several years in prison for his pursuit of justice. And prison did not yet feel inevitable. The appeal had not been decided. Nothing was final. I filled that uncertainty with imagined alternatives. Appeals take time. Files disappear. Judges surprise you. Sometimes entire countries wake up altered after a single night. In every version I rehearsed, something intervened. Prison remained theoretical.

Even on the winter morning when he called to say that the five-year sentence had been upheld, I found myself thinking: perhaps it will never be enforced; perhaps it will be delayed indefinitely; perhaps it will expire; perhaps—

The summons arrived a few weeks later and dismantled those hopes. He was given twenty days to report to Evin Prison.

There was no longer room for delay. Questions I had been postponing for months moved abruptly to the centre. What now? Would we part and return to our separate lives? Would we stay together, and would I wait for him through the years ahead? What was sensible? What was right?

Those twenty days were all he had to say goodbye to friends and relatives, hand over unfinished work, settle accounts, undergo medical examinations, and compress his entire life into a single bag he could carry. Watching him do this—watching someone dismantle a life that had been lived with continuity in mind—was quietly devastating. What remained of those days, after the practical dismantling, was all we had to decide the fate of our relationship.

Whether we stayed together or separated, the decision was difficult. What complicated matters was how new our relationship still was. Our feelings had deepened quickly, but we knew we lacked the shared history that gives long-term decisions their weight. At the same time, in the short time we had known each other, we had experienced something unusually steady, unusually freeing. Ending it without a compelling reason felt arbitrary, like responding to a threat that had not yet materialized. But was prison a compelling enough reason?

For twenty days, the question repeated itself. Morning and night, it returned unchanged. He believed it would be unfair for me to wait while he was “inside.” He worried that prison would change him, that he might emerge altered beyond recognition. He said I would meet other people, that five years was too long to dedicate to someone I had only known for months.

I listened. I wanted to decide for myself. I tried to assess the situation with clarity, to apply reason to it. The harder I tried, the less solid everything became.

On the day he went to Evin with his parents and a group of friends and relatives, I was not there. I was stranded in a terminal hundreds of kilometers away, in a city I didn’t know. My throat tightened. My heart raced. Being denied even an ordinary goodbye sharpened my resentment toward circumstance.

The night before, we had spoken until morning. After days and weeks of conversation—repeating, revisiting, circling—we reached the same conclusion: we would not force a decision. We would give ourselves time. We would see whether a relationship could survive distance and prison walls, or whether the constraints would erase the question on their own.

That morning, when I called to hear his voice one last time, the car he was in was already descending the road toward Evin. I asked small questions because they were all I could manage. My voice trembled. His did not. He joked, as he always did, and somehow made me laugh.

In the noise of the terminal, I began to cry. I told him I would wait.

Before the line dissolved, he said, almost lightly, “Whatever happens will be for the best.”

That was the last time we spoke—for a year and a half.

His imprisonment did not simply remove him from my life. It altered the conditions under which both my life and our relationship would continue. It felt as though we had entered another country, one governed by a different logic, a different language. In this place, the prison authorities determined the shape of intimacy. They decided whether we could speak, how often, for how long, and what could be said. They decided whether we could see one another, under what conditions, and in whose presence.

Because our relationship had no legal recognition, maintaining contact was especially difficult. He was allowed visits only from immediate family—his parents and brother. Since his family lived outside Tehran, they came infrequently. Occasionally, messages passed through them, brief and cautious. Direct contact between us narrowed to letters and, later, irregular phone calls.

Letters moved slowly, if they moved at all. Weeks passed while they cleared prison bureaucracy. Many were lost entirely. The slowness alone was painful, especially in a world where everyone around me communicated instantly. Worse was the scrutiny. Prison authorities monitored not only the content of correspondence, but its frequency, its direction, its patterns. We learned to write around things. We kept our language general, careful not to reveal details—about our feelings, our lives, the people around us—that might later be used against us or others.

A few months into our correspondence, the prison warden summoned him and complained that he was sending too many letters. Because he was unmarried, the warden said, it made no sense for him to be writing to women. From that point on, he was permitted only a limited number of letters per month, and only to or from his parents or brother. We adapted. We began addressing each other as “dear mother,” “dear father,” “dear brother,” writing in their voices and passing our letters through them. This arrangement continued until the end of his sentence.

Phone calls were scarcely easier. For much of his imprisonment, political and religious prisoners in his ward were denied access altogether. When calls were permitted, they were brief and irregular. We assumed they were monitored. We spoke cautiously, often indirectly. Calls could be cut at any moment. We learned to speak quickly, compressing days into minutes. There was never enough time. Conversations ended mid-thought.

Because there was no schedule, I lived in a state of readiness. My phone never left my sight. Whether at work, in class, in hospital corridors, or shopping, I made sure it was charged and audible. I left meetings to answer calls, declined invitations to places with poor reception, and learned to scan rooms for corners where I could speak without drawing attention. Still, there were times when he called and I couldn’t answer. Missing a call that had been secured with such effort—a call that might never be repeated—felt unbearable.

Prison regulations shifted constantly, sometimes cutting off even these minimal forms of contact for weeks or months. The longest silence lasted eight months. Those periods were among the hardest. Any disruption triggered the same questions: What if something has happened? What if he’s been transferred? What if he’s ill? What if he’s been taken to solitary? I refreshed human-rights websites compulsively, read fragments of news, and waited for his family to come to Tehran so I could learn something through them.

During those stretches, memory became my refuge. I returned to old photographs, reread letters, and listened to voice messages from years earlier. Each time, I did so with the irrational hope that they might yield something new.

Meanwhile, life outside continued. Often it felt as though time had stopped for me alone, as if a scene had been interrupted and I was waiting for it to resume. Eventually, I understood that I had to inhabit both worlds: the one reshaped by his imprisonment and the ordinary life that still required my participation.

I finished my thesis. I graduated. I began working. I formed new friendships. I learned, gradually, to return to daily pleasures without guilt and without diminishing my attachment to him. Sometimes, when prison conditions allowed, we chose a book to read simultaneously. Or we followed the same radio or television program at the same hour. Knowing we were engaged in the same small activity at the same time brought an unexpected calm.

I carried a notebook everywhere, recording moments he couldn’t witness. Most of those pages never reached him. Writing allowed me to speak without surveillance. And yet, in the middle of beauty—a gathering of friends, a striking sunset, a piece of music—the injustice would surface sharply: Why should he be denied this? Why should we be denied even the smallest shared pleasures?

During those years, I searched obsessively for stories like ours. In English, most accounts involved criminal imprisonment; the moral terrain felt different. I stopped reading. In Persian, the stories were closer—but nearly all involved married couples, relationships recognized and protected by law and custom. Many were well known, admired for their resistance. I read their words with admiration but felt distant from them. I was young and anonymous; few people even knew I was waiting.

Eventually, I found what I had been searching for.

It was the story of a love not unlike ours: the correspondence between an unnamed political prisoner in the Soviet forced-labour camps and his fiancée, sustained for ten years after the Second World War under the harshest imaginable conditions. Lev, who during the war had been convicted of espionage for the simple fact of knowing German, and Svetlana, who lived in Moscow, exchanged more than a thousand letters while he was subjected to Stalinist repression and censorship. Those letters—written under surveillance, delay, and fear—reached me seventy years later in the form of a book, as if to say that the thoughts crowding my mind and the feelings overtaking me were not mine alone.

The similarities between our stories were innumerable. Like us, Svetlana and Lev relied on letters as their primary means of contact—letters that took weeks or months to arrive and whose contents, like ours, were monitored. Eventually, they were fortunate enough to find trusted guards willing to smuggle letters between them, freeing them, at least partially, from the need for self-censorship. Like us, they marked birthdays and New Year’s nights by writing to one another. And even when they were not writing, they remained in constant conversation in their minds. They dreamed of each other at night. In music, they heard each other’s laughter. They too became weary, heartbroken, and overwhelmed by the injustice that enclosed them. And above all, they shared the hope—sometimes fragile, sometimes fierce—that the hard days would eventually pass.

For me, who so often felt that the people around me were galaxies away from my inner life, discovering Svetlana felt miraculous. Even the metaphors she used to describe her condition echoed my own. She wrote of time standing still: “I feel as though I am standing outside of time. I am waiting for you to come so that my life can truly begin, as if these ten years were merely the interval between two acts of a play.”

She described the paralyzing sorrow that accompanied waiting: “I have only one purpose, and that is to wait for you. The word ‘waiting’ is too passive, though. The grief in my heart consumes all my strength and leaves me unable to live my life.”

And she articulated the realization that, however difficult, waiting alone was not enough: “Everything I do feels like killing time. I know this is wrong… I must live, not merely wait.”

To see that, across time, geography, and culture, others had responded to similar circumstances with feelings so close to my own was profoundly liberating. It brought relief—a reassurance that my emotions were not aberrant, that loving someone in prison and waiting for a relationship that mattered was neither strange nor irrational.

After fifteen years of separation, Svetlana and Lev were reunited. They married, had two children, and remained together until 2008, when Lev died after a long illness. Among the scattered photographs included in the book, there was one that always held me. It showed them in the final decade of their lives, seated side by side in the small kitchen of their Moscow apartment. They were eighty-five years old. Their faces were lined with age. They sat close together, light and unburdened, smiling at the camera with an unremarkable, almost casual serenity. There was no visible trace in their eyes of the violence or cruelty they had endured.

In the hardest days of those years, I returned to that photograph again and again. Each time, the same question rose involuntarily: What will become of us? Seeing two faces so free of bitterness, so untouched—at least outwardly—by the brutality behind them allowed me to imagine a future. It made hope feel possible.

The man I waited for over five years was released one winter morning, his sentence complete. Three hundred and sixty-one days later, we were married.

The end of his imprisonment, however, did not bring an immediate end to the tension, restlessness, or difficulty that had shaped those years. The months between his release and the moment when we were finally able to begin our life together were turbulent in their own way—a story in themselves. Just as, during his imprisonment, I had gradually learned what it meant to be in a relationship with someone in prison, I now had to learn how to be in a relationship with someone newly released. It was a different lesson altogether, and one I am still learning.

In the years since our marriage, friends and acquaintances have often asked how we managed to stay connected during the time he was incarcerated. Each time I recount even fragments of those days, I am met with surprise and disbelief—a reaction that reveals how rarely experiences like ours are spoken about or acknowledged. Even now, as I write this, there are couples scattered across Iran whose relationships have been suspended by arrest or imprisonment: young women and men living through the same gruelling days we once endured, deprived of the right to phone calls and visits, counting time in silence and uncertainty, their suffering unseen, waiting alone for the freedom of the people they love.

Thinking about the extent of this injustice—the quiet violence inflicted on those who are, on the surface, free—tightens my chest. At the same time, it gives me a reason to speak and to write. I think again of Svetlana and Lev, of how, as they wrote their love and longing to one another letter by letter, they could never have imagined that seventy years later those words would illuminate the darkest nights of a young woman in Iran.

Who knows? Perhaps one of these nights, someone kept awake by longing and restlessness—someone whose sleep has been driven away by absence—will search for a faint sign of hope, or for language to make sense of what they are living through, just as I once did. Perhaps they will type the words love in prison into a search bar and, after a few clicks, arrive here.

My hope is modest: that in the unrelenting cold of separation, these words might offer, at the very least, a moment of warmth.

1. ^

    Figes, O. (2013). Just Send Me Word: A True Story of Love and Survival in the Gulag. Penguin Books.