The entire premise of Love After Lockup makes it challenging for relationships to last longterm. But for those lucky couples who turned pen pal exchanges into real life love after a prison stint ends, things have been quite rewarding.
The couples on the show are made up of one person on the outside, who fell for a prisoner who was serving a sentence. Upon the felon’s release, the lovebirds then try to make a go of it in the real world, having only “dated”— or in some cases married! — while the other person was behind bars.
The show became a massive hit after its WE tv debut on January 12, 2018. It has since become a Friday night juggernaut that has run for three seasons, with the fourth debuting on June 18, 2021. The series spawned the popular spinoff Life After Lockup, which follows couples from the show’s previous seasons to give current updates on their love lives.
It hasn’t been easy for most couples to make the adjustment to — as the title says — life after lockup. Usually expectations are high for the person on the outside that they will get married right away after years of “dating,” via being pen pals with occasional visits. But for the prisoner, life in the real world comes with a lot more pressing challenges than finding a wedding venue. Some have to move into halfway houses, while others remain on restrictive paroles. They all have to go about trying to find employment … which is quite challenging having a prison record!
Sadly, some romantic hopefuls on the outside come to find out that they were used as “tricks” by their prison sweethearts to get money and other items sent to them to make life behind bars easier. Several women on the show later discovered that their man on the inside were getting hot and heavy with other female pen pals on the outside. That has made for some very intense situations where the women come face to face. But there are seven couples from the three seasons of the show who found love, got married, and in several cases started families of their own.
Scroll down to see which couples from Love After Lockup are still together!