A lot of couples still believe absence makes the heart grow fonder. My personal opinion is "Absence makes the heart go crazy!!" How many couples do you know, that actually survive the long distance relationships...
It's been over a year since Squaddie came home from Afghan and we're now nearly 6 months into his A1 course to complete his electrician’s qualification. At his previous barracks where he had his own room, it was acceptable for me to go and stay over. So every Wednesday I'd go over to the barracks, he'd sign me in and for one night only, we'd have no one else but each other. It was amazing and probably, now looking back, taken for granted. Where he is now, they're in four man rooms, and even if I was brave enough to stay, girlfriends aren't allowed to stay while the soldiers are on training courses. So our time together is limited to the weekends, either with his family or my family.
Now, don't get me wrong, I love both our families! Of course you have the occasional argument or irritating quality that every family has, but overall, our families are wonderful! But now that our only time together is at weekends, it's so hard to try and get time together, if you understand my drift?! I'd do anything for a Wednesday night like old times!
A usual weekend will involve him coming home about 5/6pm and I'll meet him at his house, or he'll pick me up on the way through. We'll have dinner with the family, catch up on the past week and lots of cup of teas!! Brilliant!! Then we'll go down to the pub to meet all his friends, I'll catch up with the girls, he'll chat away to the boys, lovely! We'll then stumble home, tired and usually a little pissed! Get straight into bed, no nookie because we're too tired or too drunk to even fathom the thought! Then we'll wake up on Saturday morning, take a while to wake up, get dressed and try to figure out something to do with our day. It's about half and half between having a day out together and seeing people. We'll then see some more family or friends on Saturday evening and Sundays are normally spent at my house having dinner, again with family friends, and then at 5am on Monday morning, he's gone again for another week.
The weekends are more exhausting than relaxing! It's hard to just relax and have a chat boyfriend to girlfriend. And this, in my mind, is what makes the heart go crazy!! Every couple has their disagreements, it's inevitable! If you don't, you're not the perfect couple... you're inhuman! But when there's always someone around, you can't have that little discussion or argument, you have to bottle it up and wait for an "appropriate" time, which there never is! So you end up carrying around the tiniest of nigglings, which grow and grow and grow. If we do have the discussion when people are around or in between seeing people, it'll inevitably not get solved before we have to say hello to everyone... and an unsolved problem is worse than having the bloody problem in the first place!!
I can hear myself saying things and thinking to myself, "if this was one of my friends, I'd be telling them to shut up by now...", but I can't seem to shut off. I lie awake at night thinking of what I should have said, or why he isn't understanding something that's plain and simple in my head and it eats away at me. You plan to say something when you see each other, but then you realise you've only got two days, why ruin them? So again, it doesn't get solved. Ultimately, you put it to rest, but it's only sleeping in the back of your mind, until something else happens to wake it up and BOOM! There it goes again, niggling away, 24 hours a day!
Now it's got to the point, where I feel like I've barely seen him, but he's still got other things to do or people to see. After 3 weekends of one night together, it just feels like we've not seen each other. He comes home occasionally in the week, and it feels so special to have a midweek treat! But he'll get up and go in the morning and it's hard to feel like we've spent any quality time together because it's so brief. The best way to explain it is when you have a one day weekend. You've have a lovely one day off, but you don't feel rested like you've had a weekend.
I value every minute I get to spend with Squaddie, because I know how easily it can be taken away with the army. So when large chunks of time get taken away because of something else, it really affects me. A few hours away here and there at the weekend is ok, but whole days and nights is just completely different. It slices the weekend and we're back to one lovely night together, but not feeling like we've really been there together.
If we had our own place, it would be different. 5 days a week of him coming home, would be magical if you ask me! We're still not going to be spending 24 hours a day, everyday, with each other, that's not particularly healthy! But just to tilt the balance from 5 days away to 5 days at home...that's something, at the moment, I can only wish for!
So all this "absence makes the heart grow fonder" is bollocks if you ask me. Mutual short absences, maybe, but you ask any SWAG how it is to have their partner taken away for months at a time, and I highly doubt you'll get such an answer. As a SWAG, and certain civvies couples too, absence is something you have to deal with, not something to make your relationship better. The idea of spending your lives together, is that you spend your life together! When it came to our one year anniversary, we'd only spent 6 months together, the other 6 were spent with him in Afghanistan. Yes we are extremely close and Afghanistan made me realise how much I love him and how he is the one I want to be with for the rest of my life... But I would never, ever, EVER be pleased that he's going away for another 2 weeks, let alone 6 months.
If you ask me, absence makes the heart ache, take over the rest of your brain and wreak havoc!
No comments:
Post a Comment