What Now? Relationships After Deployment

Relationships are never completely easy. Communication, romance, little touches of flirtations here and there, smiles, holding hands, cuddling, and little looks that say I’m thinking about you are all important things to keep a relationship not only alive, but thriving. What do you do when you can’t have that. Military couples face particular difficulty when their partners, themselves, or even both are deployed overseas for extended periods of time. I am not talking weeks or months here. I am talking years.

For those of you who have not gone through this, think about your best friends back in high school. You ruled your world and swore you would be friends for life. Think about what happened when you went off to college for a year and didn’t keep in contact. Now come back to the moment of that first reunion when you realize you both have completely changed and become different people. Imagine that moment happening to you with your husband, your wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, or whatever else the case may be. What do you do when you both realize that you have been apart for so long, you have to get to know each other all over again.

For some relationships, especially the newer ones, this transition is particularly difficult and even painful. The reality is, many relationships do not survive deployments. Those that do are never the same. A person goes through a lot during the course of a year. New interests, new jobs, maturing, new schedules, and one’s ever-growing independence. When your significant other is gone for months, let alone years, it is difficult for both of you to mesh your now very different perspectives, interests, and even work and school into this relationship that has basically been put on hold for a very long time.

You may say that with today’s technologies communication should have been easy throughout that time, but it’s not. Granted it is much easier than it was for earlier vets, but just because you can send emails, IMs, and even the occasional web-cam session, it is difficult to keep the romance alive. You can’t wait until the demobilization is over, and then that is when things can get really difficult.

Soldiers tend to have a readjustment period when they come home. This readjustment or transition back into civilian life varies from person to person and even from deployment to deployment in the length and hardship of the readjustment. My husband just came back a couple months ago from a year long deployment to Iraq. When he came home, I knew from the get-go that this transitional period was going to be much different, and much more difficult, than the last one.