Would you marry an ex-convict?

May 20, 2015 8:11 AM

Few of us would want our sister, our daughter, or our best friend to marry a convict. Therefore we ask, would you marry an ex-convict?

It's easy to see marrying a convict as a story of Bad Relationship Decisions, but that's not how your story would be. Do you regret it, but being married to an ex-convict as hard and painful?

Crimes have different categories. But the ones I dread most are the ones that have to do with murder, armed robbery and drug peddling. These are some of the crimes that people who are engaged in them find difficult to quit. They may never give up on it.

Being a prisoner's wife requires mighty resistance — to the mind-numbing, bureaucratic prison system itself, but even more, to those who so casually dismiss us as less than, those who see us not as people who deserve support and respect but who deserve contempt.

Few of us would want our sister, our daughter, or our best friend to marry a convict — and the divorce rate for prison marriages is reportedly extremely high.

And yet many relationships that look ill-advised from the outside — and even that eventually fail — have an internal logic to the people in them, and an enduring value.

Would you marry an ex-convict?