What girl in her right mind would marry and have kids with a drug dealer?!

Some women are turned on sexually by bad men. Often guys who have been imprisoned for sex murders get lots of letters from women offering marriage.

My friend Leona would. Have you met her? She's a heartbreaker, man.

Everything I have seen on this indicates they are women who have little self-respect. They often come from homes in which a parent was abusive to them and/or to a prominent female role model in their life. Women who have been raised by strong women, or in secure family situations, do not tend to fall into this behavior. I doubt you have many women who grew up with a good father figure seeking out the male losers in society.

Actually, when I first saw this question I thought Leona was back.

me too

"Or for that matter why do woman marry prison lifers and have conjugal visits with them? "

Because they can - and no one else will.

...yeah. I miss Leona

me three.

I think some women marry prisoners feeling they will be able to save them in prison.

It's one of those things that by showing people how willing you sacrifice yourself, you make yourself important (in a way where you can deny it, making you even humbler)

Ah, no, this isn't LeonaBanks. I read that she looked like Beyonce, but of course I have my doubts. The origination of this question is from one of aiden recent posts. I thought it was fair question and wondered what others thought.

But now that people brought up former members of the a2k community I'm curious as to how large it is. And thinking about spendius' comment about stagnation (in another post), this makes me curious as to the composition of the community. I know from experience that social groups seek a copasetic relationship mixture.

There is definitely a core group flittering in and out of here. Some have been around for a decade having been part of a diaspora from a long dead forum known as Abuzz. I never counted how many people are regulars, but we certainly know each other and share a lot of A2K history. Some people stick around for a long time and then taper off, others have been hardcore, daily posters for many years. Others pop in and then go MIA for months only to reappear again. Many arrive, have their say and hit the road for eternity. Since I've joined, I've seen some great people come in and stick around (Chai2 & Tsar come to mind) and others make their mark and sadly move on (ie: Gustav, Lord Ellpus and Stray Cat). The forum is in no way stagnant, but rather an ever changing entity that waxes and wanes depending on who happens to pop in and out. It's very much what we make it.

Part of the answer to your title is in the title - "girl". There is definitely a group of very young women who get involved with men in the drug business for money, financial security (it's all a matter of perspective), status in their community that sort of thing.

And the lifers, well, a con is a con is a con. They're good (almost excellent, but they are in jail, so not excellent) at manipulating people.

Nothing new under the sun in either set of relationships.


~~~

greenie, tsar is an Abuzz original. He was the first person to respond to one of my posts there back in mmmmm 1997?. He'll always have a place in my e-heart for that.

But Gustav has been around recently, no? (gustavratzenhofer)

People post sometimes for years and then disappear, and then come back two years after that. People post for a month and float away. People show up with excruciating personal problems, resolve them, and stay. People become part of those talking, and we get used to each other, however different we are. People post just one post and get lost and can't find it again.

So it goes.

But there is a world of games and riddles I've no idea about; our most prolific poster is Dutchy, a smart, courteous man, who posts on a lot of those, but also on several community type threads. And there are other quarters, like the people who post about water softeners, and a number of language interested folks.

Numbers? over 100,000, but not all at once.

My local Chemist makes a fortune ! She's a lucky girl !

You took my thought exactly - this person obviously has not had the pleasure of discussions with our friend Leona.

Ah - so you have "met" her.

Well.... maybe to the degree y'all have. Though from the posts here it seems she made a big impact on the community. I can't say that is true for me.

This helps. Thank you for your reply.
I do enjoy online communities, and offline communities too. In the past I've had a hard to balancing both. Maybe I'm older and wiser now, and can do justice to all the people I know and care about.

More on the comical side of things. We like to have fun as well - not all seriousness.

'97! That is quite some time ago. My daughter was chatting with some guys back then, and so I decided to join in the chat community to see what it was about. For just a little while anyway. Since from the late 70's and 80's I new about BBS's (friend of mine ran a BBS off of his Atari 1200) and the online community (met someone who married someone she met in a BBS chat room), but really didn't have a desire to add chatting (posting) to my computer activities (which included everything necessary to maintain a computer network and support 500 people). I dropped out after a month or so. My daughter was 13 at the time, and the guy she was chatting with was at UCLA. She started corresponding with letters, but we stopped that immediately. And took away her chatting privileges. A few years later, '98, I joined Virtual Places because I wanted to meet new people. In the year and half I was on VP I learned a lot about myself and online communities. Plus, because I kept an open mind, I learned new things about myself and human beings in general that my middle class American experience culture hadn't provided for me. The term spirit and the ability to know and share life with people who are not physically present took on a whole new meaning for me. The company hosting VP collapsed and so did the community. VP was coded into a JAVA app that ran in a browser, and I found this distasteful on so many levels. In RL my wife had concerns that I was way too involved with my online community, and not enough with her and the family. After '99 I used ICQ and Windows Messenger to keep up with old friends until about '01, and from then on email to about '06. My wife had a MySpace account that she setup in '06 and so I had one too. Then she moved to Facebook, and in '08 I finally set up a Facebook account, where most of my family has been for two or three years (some more than that). One friend from VP days added me on FB, but they don't post anything meaningful or chat when I'm online. I find Facebook very annoying. Specifically the way posts are treated and how lacking in communal feed back. So that I could get some communal feed back on my ideas and thoughts I looked for a forum site to join. This is why I'm on a2k.