When you are a part of the military community you learn quickly to adapt to change. Maybe you got orders to Station A and the day after pack out was scheduled you find out you’re going to Station B instead.
Maybe you planned your wedding around deployments only to have your Super Sailor sent early to replace someone that was injured.
And maybe you signed your enlistment paperwork only to meet your perfect match just months before you are supposed to ship off to boot camp.
That last one, that was me. I had decided it was time to make a change in my life. I was getting out of a bad relationship, I wasn’t as financially stable as I wanted to be, I desperately wanted to go back to college for my teaching certification so I decided the Navy was the best way to for me to achieve my goals. So of course I would meet my amazing husband 3 months before I was set to ship off. Of course I would meet him three weeks before he was about to head 500 miles away from where I lived at the time. Of course we would decide we were crazy enough to get engaged after six weeks and married as soon as I graduated boot camp.
Now for the past three years we have been a dual military couple. A dual military, cross-branched couple. We have never been co-located, which means we have never had the opportunity to live together. We spent 12 months apart because it’s super fun to be on a 9 month deployment and 6 months in find out your husband is about to leave for his own 6 month deployment. It took us nearly 3 years of being together to spend 100 days with each other. And yes, we did celebrate that day with a big date day. Quite a milestone for us so what better way to celebrate than mini-golf in the South Carolina drizzle and then enough crab legs to make us explode!
But now we’re in the final stretch.
In under 9 months we will both be civilians. In under 6 months one of us will be out. We only have 3 more trips scheduled to see each other before we can start using leave for real vacations instead of stay-cations on the base. I can hardly believe there is an end in sight…
