Long-Distance Communication

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Long-distance relationship navigation is a given when it comes to military marriages. There is the extra challenge of communication that most long-distance relationships don’t experience. Whether you or your spouse is overseas, out at sea, or simply in some remote location with a horrible cell signal, traditional communication is not always as readily available as we would like it to be.

My husband spent 16 months overseas, with all the variations of communication capabilities. Wherever he was often had a terrible signal, and calls would drop all the time. There would be months on end when he would be on mission and unable to communicate at all. We learned how to get creative in order to stay in touch.

Time Zone Differences

We were fortunate enough that we were almost on opposite sides of the world, so our evenings and mornings matched up fairly well. That didn’t mean there weren’t still some sacrifices to be made. I would get up earlier than preferred, and he would often stay up later than he would have liked to.

If you are experiencing a 4-6 hour time difference, text is going to be your friend. Delayed responses are not as exciting as real-time, but sometimes that is the only option for there to be any communication to occur. Creativity is going to be your friend in this situation as well. Maybe one of you will be able to take a quick break, or lunch, when the other gets up in the morning or before they go to bed, so you have a chance to talk on the phone.

Poor Signal

As stated above, this is something I have a lot of experience with. The biggest thing to do if this is the case is to get the important stuff out first. Start your conversation with “I love you” instead of waiting till the end. Sometimes, while we were trying to move around to get a better signal, we would simply say it over and over again till we could hear each other loud and clear.

Trying a different communication app could help solve your problems as well. We found that not only would WhatsApp avoid the long-distance call fees, but it also tended to provide a better signal. There are many others out there to try. If you both have internet access, and the Wi-Fi is more cooperative, you could try a Zoom call.

No Comms

When there are no communication capabilities at all, things get simultaneously easier and more challenging. It is nice not to be worried about where you will be at certain times of the day, and if you will be free to talk then. There is also an added sleep benefit. It is hard, however, not to be able to talk to the person you love, and tell them all the wonderful things that are going on in life.

Take Notes

Maybe this is just me, but my memory is not the best. I would keep a list of notes in my phone of all the things I needed/ wanted to tell my husband, either throughout the day, or months when I couldn’t do so right away. Make sure you are not too vague about it. Otherwise, you will get to finally be able to talk and have no clue what it was you wanted to tell him about “food”.

I don’t recommend sending a lot of texts if they will not be able to go through for months on end. In our experience, only the last couple will go through once the phone is turned back on.

Snail Mail

I think I single-handedly kept the USPS in business those 16 months. I wrote a physical letter to my husband every single day. (I would collect them and send off a weekly letter all at once to save postage.) This had so many benefits for me personally.

1. It helped me to get everything I wanted to tell him out of my head. It might be a bit late by the time he reads it, but at least he will know eventually.
2. He appreciated knowing that I was thinking about him.
3. It was an excellent excuse to work on my penmanship. Cursive anyone?
4. It had a special romantic feel to it that I quite enjoyed.
5. In my opinion, much more exciting to flirt or share intimate thoughts over a letter than a text message…

E-mail

My husband would occasionally have access to the internet, if he was lucky, to be able to send and receive emails. While he was in these periods of no communication, I would email him a ton. I highly recommend going above and beyond in this category if it is an option for you.

Depending on how long they have capabilities determines the number of outside communications that will be able to get through. If it has been a week since you last wrote and only the last couple of days are able to get through, you are out of luck. If you are messaging a military email address, all of what you say will be pre-read. With that said, if they suspect that you are trying to say something you aren’t supposed to, it will be blocked. Also, someone else will be reading all your letters, so don’t say anything you don’t want a stranger to hear…

A final note on emails is, do not send anything other than words. No emojis, and no pictures. They will clog up everything and not allow other people’s mail to transfer.

Extra Ideas

Depending on the situation, the only things your loved one will have to read and remember you by are what they take with them. For this instance, I recommend pre-staging some letters to take with them.

When I went to boot camp, my mom sent me with some letters already. On the outside, she wrote things like, “read this one when you want to quit” or “read this one when you are feeling homesick”. I stole that idea before my husband left and expounded upon it. I got a journal and filled the thing. Some of them were the “read this when…” style, and others were for holidays.

I went through my calendar and for every single holiday on it, I wrote a letter to him for that day. When I felt a month didn’t have enough, I went to the internet to find more of the Ice Cream day-type holidays, so he would always have something new. I printed out and taped in some pictures of me/us as well. It was one of the things he most appreciated.

If your spouse is able to have a phone on them, it just can’t connect to anything, you can pre-send some emails for them to read. Usually, they can still be read even though there is no new incoming.

Google Docs is another way in which you can talk back and forth. What I like about this option, as opposed to an email when the internet allows it, is that you can write and comment within each other’s thoughts. Each of you using a different color makes it easy to see who said what. My mom, sister, and I would do this in high school so we could talk throughout the day without getting in trouble for texting.

Take pictures and videos. All of them. Have videos of your spouse laughing and telling you they love you. This is one of my regrets. I have never been a big photo gal, but I scrolled through all the ones I did have of him very regularly. Before we ever even started dating, I accidentally recorded a video of him laughing at me while I tried to take a picture of him. I watched it on repeat.

What if I don’t know what to say?

Sometimes life is boring. You do the same things every day and feel like you have nothing new to talk about. I am very grateful that I have the incredible ability to ramble on about nothing forever, but I know that is not a skill everyone possesses. For this, I recommend random questions. There are options for this. You can Google something like “date night questions” or “open-ended relationship questions”. There are apps with question cards that you can use to ask each other. There are also physical options. We have a deck of the Couples edition of Table Topics, but I think you could do any of them to get the ball rolling. There is another similar game called Let’s Get Deep.

Anything to give you an open-ended question to get the ball rolling. These can be done either over the phone or by email. You can send a couple of questions and chat back and forth about them.

I hope you were able to get some ideas for communication while your loved one is away. If you have any ideas of your own, of things that worked for you, please comment them below to help us all!