Letters to Prince

Letters to Prince, Chapter 12

Hard Questions Answered 

Dearest Marie,

I was glad to receive your letter and have struggled with how to answer your questions.  You see the questions are righteous in their content.  Without knowing the answers while having observed and read about my behavior over many years, why would any sane and decent woman want to converse with me much less move a relationship to another level.  At the same time, the answers may shock and push you away, when I want to do exactly the opposite.  But the only thing that I can do is to be as honest as I can and to share the parts of me that I have come to understand and reveal the parts that I still don't and have asked our Savior to help me to know myself.  

Perhaps you have read about my horrible childhood.  I was rejected by both parents at the age of 12.  My mother chose her second husband over me and when my father kicked me out of his house for fooling around with a girl she would not let me return to the home she now shared with another man.  I didn't know it, but I made an unconscious decision never to fully trust a woman again.   The message I had received was that I was unlovable and since I was so poor of a human being that my own mother could not love me then it was doubtful that any other woman ever would.  My father simply echoed what my mother had already taught me.  Later in my life, it has been written that I adored my mother and we repaired our relationship...the truth is, I felt like a kid that had finally won her love...but it never healed the wound and I to this moment I really don't know if she loved me or what I was able to do for her.

I did want forever...I wanted a woman who would love and care for me, who would have my babies...lots of them.  But, we all know what happened with my first attempt and to my son Amir.  My thoughts at the time were, see it is true.  Even God does not love me...he has cursed me to not to be able to have children.  Amir's death had led to testing and I had just  found out about my genetic disorder.  I abandoned my wife and left her to her own devices while I nursed my pain with alcohol for a few years between recording and performances.  I was hurting so much myself...but the truth is that I pushed her away and acted horribly not offering her any comfort.  In essence, I behaved like that image of me my mind had created when my mother abandoned me.  

When I was younger I played Rock Star, bedding every woman I could while on the road or in my hometown.  As I made money I flew them into my hometown and eventually into Paisley Park...but the need for companionship grew as I grew older and I finally succumbed to the call to settle down and eventually married Mayte.  While she was too young for me and too immature to handle the lifestyle into which I brought her, and too young to help me to grow emotionally, she was whom I chose and then was really disappointed because she did not know what to do to help me when tragedy struck and I refused to help her because I did not know how.  Instead I blamed her.  Of course she sought solace in other men...just as I sought solace in Manuela.  But I used that as an excuse to divorce her.  You cannot have a successful relationship if you still have open wounds or scabs from previous ones.  You do not listen to your new love as you are busy hiding those wounds from her...at least that was the case with me.  Rather than listening to the needs of my second wife, I continued to do as I always had.  I worked, I mentored young female artists mostly at Paisley Park leaving my wife in our home in Toronto.  She complained and told me numerous times that she needed to be with me more but she wanted to be in Toronto and I wanted to be wherever I wanted to be, whenever I wanted to be there.  Eventually I crossed the line and went on tour with one of my muses without even telling her. While that sounds both heartless and ridiculous now,  of interest is the fact that I never slept with her.  Not that I didn't try out of habit...but she was so young, young enough to be my daughter,  that she saw me as an older Uncle and told me that...I stopped trying to bed her as I felt both rejected and ridiculous in that statement. Mani did not believe that I wasn't sleeping with her...and she had already found someone else who was more open to living a traditional lifestyle and who could give her healthy children.  She had three miscarriages with me and had started a sexual relationship a good while before I went on that tour.  I gave up on forever when Mani filed for divorce.  

Yes I changed woman roughly every three years or so after Mayte and Mani.  Most people thought that I got bored with them...and perhaps I did with a few.  but more often the relationships had reached a point where I would have to commit or deal with the feelings of the woman I was with because I wouldn't.  Typically I was involved with those that wanted musical stardom, so I would do a project with and for them and then move on.  But know I moved on out of fear...I left them before I committed to them because I knew that like Mani and Mayte they would leave me if I stayed.  I left before any woman could ever break me again by leaving me.  Those childhood experiences scarred me for life.  They even determined how I approached dating.   I threw money at the women I was with and extravagant experiences, travel, gifts...since I did not believe I was lovable, I learned here in heaven I was trying to buy love to make up for for being short and genetically flawed.  When I think back on some of my lyrics from back then it reinforces that is true.  An example is from (There'll Never Be) Another Like Me.

I can get you what you want anything 

At all girl all you gotta say is please.

Ask your mother, your sister your brother, 

There'll never be another like me.

I threw money and music at relationships because I did not feel anything else of me was worth having.  

I went into therapy at one point to try to deal with some of the hurts and resultant feelings I had and to try to understand why I behaved as I did.   But I did not stay in long enough for it to make a real difference.  I really wish I had.  

You asked whether I had ever really loved a woman.  The truth is, I don't think so.  I always pined for the ones that left me...but that feeling was very much like the feelings I had when my mother abandoned me.  I think I was too afraid to ever really invest real love into a woman, but when she left it hurt and I felt at that moment like I had loved and was being abandoned again.  The truth is I had liked some of those with whom I was involved a lot and I would miss some of them a lot too, but fear took away my capacity to truly love a woman and my behavior...having several woman on the side of any primary relationship...not being around if something or someone else grabbed my interest,  literally pushed away any of those that I, with therapeutic help, work and effort might have come to love.  It is why I could move from woman to woman so quickly.  I had little invested and not having children made walking away even easier to do.  The closest I ever came to really loving someone was twice...with Mayte because she was carrying my child, and many, many years later, with Andy Allo.  I moved on from her because I was falling in love and it terrified me.  Plus, my body was giving out...and I did not want to saddle such a lovely young woman with those problems.  

So what does this all add up to.  One I was an ass as a young man.  I did not want to be, I just didn't know how to be anything else.  Two, those that thought I was married to my music were partially right.  Again not because I wanted to be, but because the music was the only thing that never left me that made me feel good about me.  That discovery led me to the conclusion that I was music...and in many ways that was true. Three, while I always loved sex, since I gave up on love, I became totally hedonistic with sex for a time...until I began to explore who God was seriously and entered celibacy.  Four, despite the loneliness and trauma, I had an interesting and amazing life.  I saw places and did things and accomplished things I never dreamed of and made more money than I even knew existed when I was a kid.  But the truth is, I would have traded many of those experiences and much of the money to have been able to give my all to a woman who would have given her all to me and to have had babies and raised them with her.  I never said that publicly, but I do now because it is the Gospel truth.

I hope I have answered your questions and please know that I was not in any way offended by them.  I will understand if you no longer wish to correspond with me as the truth of my internal struggles is anything but pretty.  But Marie, I hope you will continue to communicate.  I have worked hard to come to terms with my issues and continue to seek answers and healing from the Savior daily.  I have become a better soul and hope to be even better with time.  It is I who ask your forgiveness Marie and that of every woman that I ever hurt or misled as to whom and what I really was. The truth is I was not worthy of any of them as I gave little of anything that was meaningful in return for their affection.  But I have worked at becoming worthy...and I think I have made great strides to being so.

Know that I hope to hear from you again...but if not know that a piece of my heart is with you now and forever because of your loving feelings extended to me over such a long stretch of time.  Thank you Marie.

Yours, 

Prince