Newlywed Glow

Military wives get a lot of pity, especially during deployments. No matter how well things are going otherwise, no matter how convincing her happy face, she is met with the look more often than makes her comfortable.

I moved back to my hometown a few months after my husband proposed and here I’ve stayed since we’ve been married, awaiting the endless cycle of TDYs. In the last eighteen months, he’s been on three TDY’s averaging four weeks each and is currently serving a six-month deployment. Before that he was in training, so in the past two years we’ve spent nine and a half weeks together.

Two years, nine and a half weeks. To preempt the aforementioned look: this isn’t my obligatory “happy face,” it’s my newlywed glow.

We get to be newlyweds for a long, long time. I still get butterflies when he kisses me. We still send each other flirty texts and ims. I still daydream about lazy days spent doing nothing together. He still looks at me with the same awed, adoring eyes as when we first met. I still enjoy cooking for him. We haven't had a single fight about household chores. We don’t talk about “someday” as a distant future, but as a “soon.”

Several seemingly contradictory and amazing things can happen during and after a deployment (but I’m only going to write about happy ones this time). First, the stress that bonds couples can give a new marriage the feeling of a golden anniversary. Second, the time apart can make you feel all the feelings you felt at the beginning. I’m not saying that my life is suddenly filmed in a soft glow whenever he’s back. But for all the growing up we’ve done together, all the big decisions and bad days, we aren’t an old married couple.

And I hope we never will be.