I had a military wife email me through Facebook this past week with a question that I think a lot of us can relate to. Here’s what she asked:
My husband and I are nearing our third month in our deployment as he continues to serve in Iraq. We have been able to communicate fairly regularly with the help of sending emails back and forth to each other just about daily. We recently started using Skype to set up what I like to call “Web Dates.” I thought it would be our time to communicate and have face to face conversations with the help of modern technology.
The only problem is that these little dates are seeming to always be interrupted by everyone else who logs on to want to talk to him. He knows this bothers me because I end up having to “fight” for his time and attention and yet I feel so selfish because I know how much his family and friends want to talk to him too. Because of the time differences there is only one time during the day that he’s able to talk to everyone and it becomes crazy trying to hold these one-on-one conversations.
Any suggestions on how to handle communication dilemna’s like this one? How
were you and your husband able to keep your marriage fresh and intentional with
the distance factor?
Have you had to deal with similar situations? It can be SO hard figuring out how much to include extended family and friends when your time is already so limited and emotions are high. In fact, that’s one of the reasons that today’s prayer for our “This is the Day to Pray Campaign” (see the most recent post) that we’re doing over at Wives of Faith is all about relationships with mother-in-laws. They aren’t always easy! Even when you have a great MIL like I do, when it comes to deployment, the emotions and feelings that can come up when the person is away that all of you love, family and friends included, can be really hard to deal with sometimes, especially when you’re feeling forced to divide time, which can be hard for you and also for your husband who is the one away from everyone.
Here is what I said when I wrote back. Maybe it will help someone else dealing with a similar challenge.
Yes, the communication issue can be so frustrating, especially when dealing with extended family and friends. I’ve been thinking about your question and I think there are two things to look at.
First, and this is the side of the coin that you and I as wives don’t really like, it is important that your husband gets to hear from other family and friends too. In fact, it is really great that other people want to talk and are checking on him, etc. Our SS class at church and our friends were quite the opposite when my husband was deployed, and it made him wonder if anyone even cared. So, that is a bright side to this whole thing.
BUT – the other side of it is that as a couple, you need those precious minutes to connect as much as you can given that you’re physically apart right now. As women especially, we need that emotional connection, we need to know that our husbands still only have eyes, (or in this case ears and eyes
)for us. You need to feel like you have some time that’s just the two of yours… you’re already having to share him with the military; it makes it that much harder when you’re also having to share your conversation time with other people as well.
So here’s my suggestion – since you are getting to talk to him almost daily, why don’t you talk to him about a compromise? Tell him you understand that it’s important he get to talk with his friends and other family but that you really value having time that’s just for the two of you, that it’s important to you. Ask him if there would be a way that he could designate one day during the week that would be to talk with friends and family, and then maybe you stay off Skype for that day and let him deal with all the one-on-one multiple conversations. Then you get him the rest of the week. I haven’t used Skype enough to know if there are certain tools you can use to ignore or avoid interrupting im’s or calls (Cliff’s location and his situation didn’t allow it), but maybe if your husband sends an email out and lets people know that he can
talk on this day, but the rest of the time, even if he appears online, he will be busy with other things, something like that, maybe that would help. Just an idea.Or maybe instead of skype, if you can’t get well-meaning people to take a hint, then you guys agree to talk by regular phone (if he can) a couple of days a week and that is your one on one time. The most important thing is that you guys talk this out and find a solution you’ll both be happy with, and remember that your marriage will last a whole lot longer than this deployment will.
What are some of the ways you have handled communication issues during deployment? I hope to start a series on Monday talking about this very thing. Come join us!
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We also email and use skype. I suppose I don’t quite have this same problem (its actually not a bad problem to have LOL)…We can connect to sykpe but if we video conference it is chopping, we can’t communicate in a typical pattern anyways so we always end up logging off video (fighting for bandwith is not how I want to spend my time) and we “chat” just back and forth like IMing. I like the suggestions you gave Sara. This is always an issue-having to struggle to find ‘alone’ time together-as I like to call it. My husband typically calls once per week and that is time for US alone. Also when we do skype, we log in so that it is just us and our IM session is not open to others. Again–this makes it ‘our’ time alone. No one interupts our time during that 20 min or however long we have. He does make a point of using emails with everyone else. When you have such limited time to communicate, something has to give. I think in general everyone has been supportive of us and knows that we really need that time ‘alone’ more than they do.