.Defined by Paper & Past.

When I first met Matthew, the world didn’t see him the way I did. On paper, he was a convicted murderer. An ex-inmate. A man defined by a single decision and 23 years of his life spent behind bars.

What the paper can’t capture is the boy who went into prison at just 15 years old. It can’t capture the man who came out at 39, carrying both the weight of what he had done and the strength of what he had endured. Paper doesn’t show the years of survival in a place that breaks most people. Yet somehow shaped him in the ways that matter most. It doesn’t show how he values every freedom most of us take for granted: the taste of a meal at a family table, the sound of children’s laughter, the simple joy of breathing air without fences around it.

When you love someone like Matthew, you quickly realize that society will try to make you question it. People are quick to say, “once a criminal, always a criminal.” It grinds my gears, because I thought it was " Do the crime, do the time". They remind you that parole isn’t freedom, it’s a leash, waiting to snap. They tell you what they see on paper, but paper doesn’t hold the truth. Paper is cold. Paper is flat. Paper doesn’t look into someone’s eyes at night and see hope fighting its way through the scars.

Love, however, does.

Love shows up in the way he smiles and listens to my children when the world says he doesn’t deserve that role. Love is in his gentleness, his patience, the way he doesn’t flinch from responsibility but embraces it. It’s in his resilience, his refusal to let his past dictate his future. It’s in the late-night conversations where he admits all the things he never experienced, and the wonder that lights up his face when he tries them for the first time Simple stuff like ordering food through an app, watching a movie that came out while he was locked away, hearing a song everyone else already knows but it’s brand new to him.

Dating someone on parole isn’t romantic in the ways people imagine. It’s hard. There are curfews and restrictions. Every decision, every plan, carries extra weight. Job applications are not the issue, but landing a job is an uphill battle. Most doors slam before they ever truly open. Housing is another battlefield, with rejection after rejection, each one cutting deeper than the last. But alongside the hardship, there is resilience.

There is celebration in the smallest victories. There is laughter over lunch, joy in ordinary afternoons, a determination to prove, to ourselves, to the world, that love and growth are possible even after decades in the dark.

I chose to see Matthew, not the file. The man, not the sentence. I chose to see the partner who loves me, the father figure who guides with tenderness, the spiritual man who has searched for grace in a place where grace is rarely found. He made a terrible mistake as a boy, and he has paid for it with more than half of his life. Loving him isn’t about pretending that never happened. It’s about believing he deserves a future. It’s about seeing that people are more than the worst thing they’ve ever done.

The paper tells you the facts. But love, it tells you the truth. The truth is, Matthew is more than his past. We all are. He is proof that redemption is possible, that hearts can heal, that freedom isn’t just walking outside prison gates, but it’s being given the chance to love, to be loved, to live again.

I know what I see in him. It’s not the ink on a page. It’s the man standing beside me, every single day, choosing life, choosing love, choosing us.