Dear Jane,
I love my wife, but lately I’ve found myself obsessed with an unshakable feeling, so much so that I think about it every day: I’m afraid she’s a secret psychopath and that one day she’s going to kill me.
She is obsessed with true crime. Lately, she’s been loving the new Eddie Redmayne series “The Day of the Jackal” and Netflix’s spy thriller “Black Doves.”
She says things like, “Wouldn’t being a hitman be a great job?”
The problem is that it often seems like she’s being half-serious.
Recently, after a colleague pissed her off at work, she came home and said with a completely dead expression, “I’d be really happy if they died.”
It’s always been that way, and I’ve always written it off as her dark humor. But last week it was her birthday and I gave her a brand new set of Japanese kitchen knives.
As I watched her marvel at them, I suddenly had a nightmare vision… that she would use them to cut me into pieces! Now I can’t take my eyes off them.
Dear Jane: My wife has subtle habits that make me fear she is a secret psychopath who will one day kill me
Reading the news about this New York killer – whose friends say he was a perfectly normal man… until he wasn’t – makes it all worse.
I know I probably sound completely crazy. But is it really unpleasant to wonder if my wife might break up one day?
By,
Killer instinct
International bestselling author Jane Green provides sage advice on readers’ most burning issues in her column about Aunt’s agony
Dear Killer Instinct,
If it makes you feel any better, pretty much every woman I know is obsessed with true crime.
All my girlfriends consume Dateline and 20/20 endlessly. We loved Happy Valley and are now working on The Day of the Jackal and Black Doves. We choose Jane Doe over Jane Austen any day.
But to calm your perhaps overactive imaginations, few of us (dare I say virtually none of us) lie in bed at night thinking about how we can kill our husbands and get away with it.
Women spend much of their lives learning to live with the constant fear of all the ways we are vulnerable.
I don’t know a single woman who hasn’t been scared walking down the street at night or hearing a loud set of footsteps behind her.
We have also all experienced unwanted advances, both sexual and violent, from men.
The resulting fear is something we carry with us all our lives, something that never goes away. And it’s something that most men will simply never understand.
True crime – and an obsessive study of it – may just be our way of feeling a little stronger. How Doing women come out of terrible situations? What could I do if I found myself in the same terrible situation as the character on screen?
The better informed we are, the more likely we are to save ourselves if something terrible happens. Or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.
I hope this reassures you. But if that’s not the case, and if your wife finally decides to put a little arsenic in your breakfast smoothie, then – if these true crime dramas are to be believed – she will spend the rest of her life in prison.
It is (almost) always the woman. Or the husband. But they (almost) always get caught.