Every now and then you come across a story which manages to combine all the quirky ingredients that can make military life so unique, challenging and yet wonderful. Oh, how I loved this story....
My husband is a GySgt in the Marine Corps. We've been married almost two years and our relationship is not typical. He lives in North Carolina at MCAS Cherry Point, and I live in Redmond, WA. How did this happen? Well, it's a Web 2.0 love story; a social media fairy tale. It goes something like this: I had a weekly show on Xbox LIVE called "Community Close-up". He was on recruiting duty in Buffalo NY. He saw my videos and liked them. He followed me on Twitter, then friended me on Facebook (scrolling through thousands of female Microsoft employees because he didn't know my real name). We chatted on Facebook and Twitter and my trip to a Community Conference in Vegas coincided with his transfer to Cherry Point and leave. Just before the doors closed on my flight to Vegas I semi-jokingly emailed him on my smartphone an invitation to spend the weekend in Sin City. He showed up 24 hours later. Three weeks later he proposed on Twitter. Romantic, eh? What unusual is that we have never lived together. The longest stretch of cohabitation was 5 weeks when our daughter was born. (She had a Twitter account while still in utero). He comes home about every six weeks for a long weekend. Our face time is all about quality, not quantity.
The story goes on to discuss how this Marine Wife smartly uses technology to keep her family connected.Read it all here. Many of my friends and family would read this story and find it a bit odd. I don't. That's because I've been around the military for so long. I too had a brief courtship, engagement and wedding. Lots of us have. Things tend to move fast when you fall in love with a warrior.... And these days, it seems more and more spouses are opting to live apart, for a variety of reasons.
I think most of us have decided to embrace the "quirks" of military life. And the quirks do make it interesting.I love listening to milspouses tell me how they met and married their partner. The stories tend to be entertaining and fascinating. Not what you typically find in the civilian world, especially post 9/11. How'd you meet your spouse, and what kind of wedding did you have? Other than deployments, have you ever opted to live apart?
