Talk To Me

In my nearly 3 years as a Navy wife, what is the one thing I have learned that is Key to a Military Relationship? Not even just a military relationship, Relationships in general? Communication.

Without communication what do you have? Nothing really. Without good communication, You can't have trust, can't have full honesty.. You don't have a Solid foundation for a relationship. You're left with a relationship that is set up for failure- UNLESS you improve on both partner's communication with each other.

Lack of communication causes couples to grow apart. I'm not talking about the long periods of time that a service member CAN'T contact you due to deployment. In your casual emails, phone calls.. day to day life together.. How much is really said between the two of you? How often does he tell you how he's doing? When in port, does he tell you about the things he did? Things he seen? How included in his or her life are you without being there? And reverse it.. How included do you keep them in your life while he or she is away during deployment? It all falls back on communication with each other.

My husband and I didn't always have good communication skills- making periods of time very tough for each other. We weren't together physically, he was away to a-school and I wasn't allowed to live with him. Aside from boot camp, it was the first time we had ever been apart from each other. We thought our communication was good, but in reality, we had a lot to learn.

A-school, as some of you may know, was our big challenge. What made that so challenging is because our communication with each other was rather horrible. It led to trust issues and little lies. I had honestly wondered at times if our marriage was going to be broken due to the military (Military not to blame, but only ourselves- didn't see that then).

Both of us wanted things to work, and work well. We loved each other too much not to. We started to work together and find the root cause of our trouble. It came down to communication. We started discussing more, talking things out- every situation, every issue we faced from there on out. Then the Workups started at his permanent duty station. We knew it was going to challenge us again.

I'm proud to say, that all the work we put into learning to talk to each other and work together paid off. It also totally proved my point to me and to him. Communication is KEY to a relationship. You NEED it. Here we are more than 2 years later, and our communication skills are as strong as ever. I don't hear from him every day.. sometimes longer, but I'm apart of his every day life and he is mine. He writes to me when he can, sometimes they are short emails.. but he will go out of his way to write me to make sure I know he loves me and that he needs me. I tell him about all my little endeavors without him (minus homecoming surprises) to make him feel like he stays apart of my life here at home without him. This allowing our trust to stay strong.

I could keep going with this post, but I feel I'm starting to ramble.

Just talk to your SO, get them involved. Communicate.