I love being married to my husband, and I would never want to know what life would be like if we hadn’t decided to get married. As you know, he’s in the military and being married meant leaving my friends just three-ish months after our wedding.
“See you later, friends. This wife is off to a new adventure!”
Trying to make friends at a new duty station can be difficult, to say the least. It can feel like going on a series of failed blind dates before you find your person, only to find out they’re PCSing in a couple of months. It never fails. I got lucky when I found my person, my first milspouse friend. We ended up at two of the same duty stations back to back.
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If there was a dating app for finding new friends at each new duty station, my profile might read something like this:
Hi, my name is Grace, and I’m seeking new friends! I moved here a few weeks ago, and now that I’m settled into my house, I have to get out or I’ll go stir crazy!
Military spouses are the most resilient people I’ve ever met.
It’s funny that I never used the word “resilient” until becoming a military spouse myself. After making many friends from various duty stations, I’ve learned that military spouses are tough—the exact definition of resilient—because of the always-evolving life situations thrown at us.
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As soon as we get official orders, the goodbye knot of dread in my stomach starts to form. If I were to make a list of the things I dread about PCSing, saying goodbye wins the gold medal. Yes, I hate the smell of boxes and the sound of screeching tape. And yes, I would give any amount of money to never again have to open my kitchen cabinet doors and have a complete stranger tell me, “Whoa, ma’am, that’s a lot of dishes.”
My husband and I have been married for less than three years and are still chugging along at our first duty station. I didn’t grow up with an affiliation to the military life, so I’m pretty content with things always just being the way they are.
Rarely did a big change ever occur in my life that threw off my daily routine or the people I socialized with, and I’m slowly starting to get a taste of what it’s like to experience change in this Army world.
Deployments are a challenge and each has different struggles. Almost anyone who has been through one, or half a dozen, knows that.
Our lives often change abruptly, and no matter how much planning has been done, a new and unknown monkey wrench gets thrown into the mix.
Mission: Milspouse is a
501(c)3 nonprofit organization.
EIN Number: 88-1604492
hello@missionmilspouse.org
P.O. Box 641341
El Paso, TX 79904
