Military Wife Tips: Keeping Any Long Distance Relationship Alive

I have read the same old tips and tricks for long distance relationships on numerous web sites. Usually they are no-brainers, or they are so unrealistic they lack a practical explanation of how do you use it? My goal here is to give some tried and true techniques to making the distance shrink, and use my own life and experiences as practical examples.

My husband is a submariner in the United States Navy, and together we have completed 2 deployments plus countless weeks of workups, exercises, and short-term separations. If you also include the long hours he works while he is port, usually leaving the home before the sun rises and returning long after it has set, we have spent far more time apart than physically together. I am well versed in his absence at holiday gatherings. In 4 years, he has been absent 4 Halloweens, 3 Easters, 2 entire summers, 2 Thanksgivings, and 1 Christmas. He has already missed 75% of our anniversaries, and I have only celebrated his birthday with him on time once. Thankfully he has never missed my birthday, but that required me to fly to Japan this year just to keep that one holiday free from his absences!

I grew up a Navy dependent, so I didn't naively marry into the Navy family. I knew the hard work and dedication it takes to make a military marriage work. I watched my parents constantly toil at keeping their relationship alive and our family close from infancy until I was 18 years old. None of the pain and loneliness is ever alleviated by the money you receive or the fact that military families fill a revered patriotic role in their many sacrifices.

Despite all of this, I wouldn't trade my marriage or life for anything. Our relationship is not easy. But, my husband and I have some tried and tested techniques we use to keep our relationship alive.

First, misery loves company. But, you must use this to your advantage and not disadvantage. Saying that you miss each other is fine, important in fact. Complaining about always being separated or the other person always being gone is a sure fire way to make things worse! Unintentionally, the complaints make it sound like there is fault assigned, and blaming inevitably follows.

So, how do you commiserate together? Talk about people who have it worse than you! Not actual people you know, but hypothetical professions or situations that are far worse. For example, I tease my husband that I am thankful he isn't in a rock band. If he was, he'd be on tour all the time, in sleazy night clubs and bars, with women throwing their panties at him all night long. I apologize in advance to any rock star readers out there I may have offended. Being on submarines, I know he can't form a drug habit because the Navy tests, and the amount of women he even has access too is limited by the amount of port visits he gets! Plus, I don't have to worry about his work becoming unpopular and our next paycheck isn't dependent upon Billboard's Top 40.

If you're feeling really low, try making a list of people and situations worse than yours. The doctors and nurses who work graveyard shifts... the factory workers with rotating shift work...the police and firefighters who can't stop working if an emergency comes up... anyone in corporate America with a thankless job making them travel most of the week.

Don't play who has it worse off between the two of you. In the vein of blaming each other, don't ever try to determine who has it worse. It is an argument no one wins. Everyone handles loneliness, separation, and anxiety differently. Even two people who love one another and think they know everything about his or her partner can't with 100% accuracy know how the other one feels. One way to help prevent this tendency is to walk a few feet in your partner's shoes.

I am an expert in "left behind mentality." When I imagined his life underway, I envisioned he is getting to watch movies whenever he wants, while performing super cool military work, and seeing glamorous foreign places. Once I went to a few port visits this past deployment I learned first hand what he means by "dirty port towns." These places aren't the vacation spots I imagined! They are typically old (commerce by sea is an ancient transportation form), run down, and filled with limited and often morally questionable entertainment forms. I don't often leave home while he is home, but a few times I have had to travel for a weekend here or there while he was "left behind." He knows a little of what I mean when I say how depressing it is to eat dinner alone, and the chill of opening the door to an empty, dark house each night.

Argue for the health of the relationship, not for the makeup sex. All relationships have fights, and being separated certainly doesn't make you immune. The important thing about disagreements in long distance relationships is that your communication is weighted heavier than in normal relationships. If you are talking on the phone, remember you can't use physical touch right away to erase the pain of a hang up or screaming rant. Email is even worse, as I well know, because written words can be read, reread, and then copied and pasted against you at a later date!

Tabling discussions is a vital way of keeping the fighting fair. Don't corner your partner or yourself into immediate reactions about situations. Take some time to digest the information, think of what outcomes you are willing to live with, and agree to revisit the topic at a later time. Use this method to edit out some of the rage and knee-jerk viciousness that spawns from lovers' quarrels and their high emotional investment. Ironically, this is easier to do in long distance relationships. In face-to-face communication it comes off as avoidance or a cop out. Or, you just can't seem to "walk away" from the fight. Many times you have this opportunity without even having to address it - i.e. something happens and you disagree, being separated you take a night to think about it and just address it in your next daily/weekly email or phone call. Voila! Automatic cool off time.

Remove negative people about your relationship from your relationship. Long distance relationships are abnormal situations. Phrases like "It'll never work" or "It's too hard" are quick to leave the lips of our closest friends when they discover our love life decision to try one. Feel free to keep these people as your friends, but remember they aren't the one in love with your significant other. Their advice is about as relevant as a square peg to a round hole. Even more frequently, these people have never even tried a long distance relationship! It is normal to vent and discuss your relationship woes with friends and family, just don't choose to do so with ones who are rooting for your failure from the get-go. You wouldn't seek a clearly biased opinion before shopping for a big ticket item, so don't seek a clearly biased opinion now.

Keep the signs of love and devotion creative and fresh. Cards and letters declaring undying devotion and love are nice, yet over time they lose their effect. I used to write my husband a letter every morning before he went on duty, which means he spends the entire night on the submarine while it is in port. After about six months of this, I would ask him something to the effect of "SO? What do you think about my decision about (blank)?" The blank would be a subject covered in the love letter. His response would be one of confusion and his face in an expression of surprise. Just imagine the huge row we had when I realized he had quit reading them! My easily calculated reaction was to quit writing them.

A few months down the road, we were heatedly discussing the effort each of us was giving to the relationship (Yes, I was accusing him of not giving enough effort; being the female in the relationship I am sure you are shocked I would make such an accusation of my husband). During the discussion, he threw out "Oh yeah?" and finished with the fact that I didn't write him love letters on duty anymore! It turned out it wasn't the content of the letters that made him feel loved; it was the act of writing a letter to him that was the sign of love. Once we realized doing the same things over and over again eventually lost their novelty and perceived effort required, it freed us to be creative in how we showed love.

Many couples don't have the imagination required to think beyond kisses and hugs. Enjoy creative outlets you have normal couples don't. It would look pretty silly for Mrs. Jones to send Mr. Jones a care package when they live in the same house! Yet, everyone gets a thrill at mail that isn't a bill or junk. Be fearless! Even if your lover is embarrassed by the poem, or getting flowers delivered at work, because you are separated it is easier to mentally calculate the amount of effort and thought that went into the gesture. You get enormous kudos points for that. When you live in close proximity, it is so easy to overlook these things.

I hope these tips help other couples make oceans and continents, or even a few hundred miles, inconsequential to their future happiness as a couple. I can't promise that these suggestions will overcome the other road blocks to successful long distance relationships. It is still going to take large amounts of trust, confidence in each other, and belief that you CAN make it work. It only takes a little thought away from the norms of regularly distanced relationships and using slightly different tools to fix the same kinds of problems. I still hate it with all the energy I can muster when my husband packs his sea bag. But, he is my life, and I never feel unloved or that our relationship is in serious jeopardy. I just feel lucky we had the life experiences to know what to do or figured them out as we went along. And for those other Navy wives out there, you understand my countdown to shore duty!