Most do not survive, and the honest numbers are sobering. Very few relationships make it past the 18-month mark when a long sentence is involved, and the ones that do are genuinely the exception rather than the rule.
What makes it harder to understand is that the breakdown does not always happen the way people expect. It is not always the person on the outside who walks away. Some of the most painful stories involve women who held it down completely, visiting every week, sending money, magazines, books, staying faithful for years, and then watching the person they waited for walk out the door and disappear. No explanation, no gratitude, just gone. That pattern happens more than it should and there is no clean explanation for it beyond the fact that some people come out of a long sentence needing to feel completely untethered from everything that defined their incarcerated life, including the people who loved them through it.
The inmates who do stay are a smaller group but they exist and the relationships tend to be built on something genuinely solid. Surviving a long sentence together, from opposite sides of the wall, requires a level of communication, trust, and commitment that either breaks people apart or forges something unusually strong.
I did 66 months in federal prison. I lost my relationship while inside and had to fight to rebuild it when I got out. We are still together. It is possible. It just requires both people to want it enough to do the work when the door finally opens.
If you are holding it down for someone right now, know what you are signing up for with clear eyes. Love is real and loyalty matters. So does protecting yourself emotionally if the person you are waiting for is not capable of honoring what you gave them.