How to Make Agree your Partner for Military Job

Geographical separation, be it for 6 weeks, 6 months or more, is inevitably difficult. The key to successful outreach for any couple is to learn together all you can to prepare for your time off.

A mission can be a very emotional and difficult time for many couples. Just as service members understand the importance of commitment, couples should pursue “family commitment” as the deployment approaches. Making deliberate plans ahead of time will help you tackle this challenging period.

Your unit is sure to have a wealth of information on the logistical preparations you need as a couple. The focus of this article is on the emotional and relational preparation that will help you face the challenges that are inevitable during an assignment.

Readers of this blog will be familiar with the Sound Relationship House. The fundamental basis for all relationships is “love mapping”. Before deployment is a good time to update your maps of each other’s inner and physical worlds.

Find out about the deployment
Where will your spouse be How long does it take to deploy? Learning as much as you can about where your partner will be and what he or she will do can help reduce anxiety and insecurity. In some cases, security issues may prevent you from getting as much information as you want. Hence, part of this Love Map update needs to be a discussion of how to communicate while apart. Can you use communication apps, phones, or email? Find out about possible security restrictions in advance and do what you can to keep in touch. Geographical distance, coupled with the schedule requirements of deployment, can destroy your emotional closeness unless you intentionally plan how to stay in touch.

Practice checking in each other on how you feel
Learn how to use the “soft start-up” together to identify what you are feeling and to ask what you need. Practice this together prior to deployment so that you can better sustain this experience when apart. Here is an article that explains more about this ability.

Share preference and admiration
Even if you are physically separated, there is a simple exercise you can do together as the deployment progresses. This would be an excellent time to begin developing the “Seven Week Plan for Sharing Love and Admiration” in Dr. Study John Gottman’s book, The Seven Principles That Make Marriage Work. In many of these activities, short notes are written together. The suggestions can help keep lines of communication open and fuel your fires of love, romance, and passion for one another while you are away.

Build up and connect with your community
Many branches of the ministry offer support in the form of social groups, counseling, or counseling. Find out what is available to you as a military family member. During the desert storm, I was the company commander of the Heidelberg Army Hospital. Due to our location in Germany and the fact that our unit consisted of a large number of medical specialists, our soldiers were made aware of other units one after the other and then deployed with them. Our post-chaplain and I have teamed up to offer a support group for the families left behind by my soldiers’ missions, and I have seen firsthand how an affiliated, supported group helped the spouses at home with feelings of loneliness and dealing with isolation and overcoming it.

Contact other people who are currently going through or have already experienced an assignment
Take part in all of the preparation activities offered by your unit. Military families who have already been deployed may have valuable tips and advice on dealing with the breakup. A key finding in the pioneering Deployment Life Study, which examined over a period of three years how the deployment affects the health and well-being of military families, was that experience helps alleviate the relationship problems of a deployment. The study’s authors concluded that while provisioning was associated with lower marital satisfaction, the largest decrease in marital satisfaction was with the initial provision of the service member