What is a Geographic Bachelor or Geo-Bachelor?  It is when a service member and family make the decision to live in different locations due to the service members upcoming PCS, or to allow a spouse to not have to give up their career due to a service members PCS. For our family, my husband’s new duty station was three hours away from his previous Duty Station.

Every family that decides to Geo-Bach has their own reasons, and it is never an easy decision to make.

Our family’s decision to Geo-Bach in 2019 was not an easy one either. it was the first time we were faced with this decision in my husband’s 28 year career. We had three kids still in school, our two daughters in high school and youngest son at an incredible private school for students with special needs.

Our kids absolutely were against moving, our sons school was a dream and we hated to have to tear him away from such a wonderful learning environment. We (unlike many military families who choose this path) had the privilege of my husband’s new assignment being so close and coming home every weekend was not going to be a problem.

But there are obstacles.

Our biggest obstacle was finding a rental for my husband which was not easy at first but fortunately a coworker was relocating himself and my husband was able to take over the apartment from a lovely couple. 

As 2019 went on we settled into the new normal of my husband coming home every Friday night (sometimes Thursday if there was a four-day weekend) while I settled in to making our new house a home.

Monday through Friday though it was all on me. That included the kid’s homework, housework, unpacking, organizing and just the “day to day” stuff to keep our family going.

Not to mention I always wanted to make sure my husband came home to a clean house and happy teenagers. So I tried to have all their teenage problems handled so we could just be a happy family for the weekend.

It’s important to have some fun with the situation.

The funniest thing I did during that time was I bought new clothes so he never saw me in the same outfits when he came home. My husband (for his part) was also on his best behavior, not leaving laundry on the floor or dishes in the sink. He too wanted to make the most of our weekends and not rock the boat or disturb the routine we developed while he was gone during the week.

It almost felt like reintegration after deployment except it was happening every single week.

Although it was great to live this “Ozzie & Harrie”t life, it wasn’t realistic to keep that up. We needed to get back into our normal swing of things even with my husband being gone during the week.

When we started being normal again it took the pressure off from trying to be perfect for the small amount of time we actually got to spend together daily. 

I was constantly asked by family and friends was it hard with him being gone during the week.

Of course I said no, because who was I to complain.  My husband wasn’t deployed or working overseas, he was right here just three short hours away. The Geo-Bachelor life was working and just as we had adjusted to it.  The Covid pandemic made things difficult with military travel restrictions and that meant my husband could no longer come home over the weekends.  It was tough with homeschooling and a graduating senior 

We spent those many months of the travel restrictions video calling, sending each other little gifts, and many many Amazon cleaning product orders I had sent to him weekly. We also spent our wedding Anniversary on a video call watching the live action Lady and the Tramp movie and eating “take out” from Olive Garden that he surprised ordered for me.

It probably was one of the best dates we ever had.

After four long months the travel restrictions were expanded which meant he could return to coming home every weekend again and just in the nick of time to see our daughter graduate from Highschool on our front steps. 

Resources to help you make a decision.

If you want to read further on making this decision, here are a few resources: The geo-Bachelor Conundrum & The Paycheck chronicles: Geo-Bachelor.

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