why exactly I am posting this, but it's my blog, I can do what I want! I just ran across something I posted on a Marines board in January about my experiences as an OCS spouse. Interesting reading it knowing now what I didn't know then -- that boot camp was in the near future. Anyway, here's my discourse from the wayback machine:
Here's my two cents as a significant other who has been through the OCS experience twice, once as a girlfriend 3,000 miles away and once as a wife in visiting vicinity.
When he was in OCS in 1998, it was the summer between our junior and senior years, and we had lived together the previous year. It was really tough being separated, but I think I was lucky in that I was insanely busy and dealing with an entirely new situation myself. I did a two-week out-of-state training program before moving to a new city and starting an internship, and I was working a lot and didn't have a lot of time to pout or worry. But I also really didn't have a clue what he was going through. I wrote every day and spent my Saturdays hoping for a phone call (in my pre-cell phone days, so this meant staying at home), but I didn't "get it." I missed him, and it was hard, but it was a growing experience for me in that I was living entirely on my own for the first time and getting amazing work experience, so I was proving to myself that I could take care of myself (not that I was dependent on him, more that I was apart from my family, friends and him and was doing just fine). That definitely made the situation a lot easier for me. I was distracted and kind of naive about the challenges he was facing, so I think I worried less. (That naivete pretty much evaporated when I saw him when he came home after 8-plus weeks with a stress fracture. He was soooo thin and looked so different and was still kind of in OCS shock.)
The second time around ([last] summer) was totally different. I was close enough to visit on the weekends (sometimes), and after hearing OCS stories for six years (heh), I was much less clueless about what he would be going through. But by this point, we'd been married almost four years, I was in a routine at work, we were pretty interdependent, and I was much less distracted. When he left, we thought that he'd pretty much be able to come home for liberty most weekends after he got through the first three weeks, so I thought I would just get through it week by week and see him on weekends. That didn't quite end up being the case. But I tried to give my support by going to base and hanging out with him at the commissary if he couldn't leave base or meeting at Potomac Mills for the afternoon if he was duty platoon and couldn't come home overnight. That was for me, too: I needed to see him to really know how he was doing, and I knew a little reminder of normal life aside from letters was probably welcome by him. (I still can't figure out if the movie Anchorman really was *that* funny, or if we were just so relieved to be doing something as normal as watching a movie together at a theater that we laughed hysterically for an hour and a half. But I digress.) I signed up at officerfamilies.com and "met" a couple of people from his class -- a couple of us IM'd one another during the week. That kind of support was really helpful, too.
I'm reading over this and feel like I'm portraying myself as Ms. Stoic through this whole thing, and that is definitely not the case. I fell apart when he left, both times, and when he came home, both times. I definitely got upset when I was hoping for phone calls and they didn't come, and I was hysterical when I found out he was being sent home with pneumonia at (the end of) week nine. But I guess what I'm saying is it's handle-able. If your gf can't get through a day without getting your opinion on something, it's probably going to be rough. On the other hand, you might both figure out that you can get through it apart from each other. It is asking a lot of someone to become a military spouse -- especially when there are so many active combat zones. But if you are honest with yourself and your significant other about what joining the Marines means to you and both get as much information as you can about what it's really like (not having control over where you live, etc etc), both people can assess the situation and figure out what to do.
I don't really have the time to analyze this right now, just wanted to get a copy for myself basically.
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