Up in the Air

Welcome to the boards. I have to agree with a lot of what Tricia said. When I met my FH he had just came back from his first tour in Iraq (15 months) and was not-quite divorced from his ex-wife who had cheated on him while he was deployed and he came home on R&R right before Christmas to a court date that she set up, knowing he would be home at that time. With everything he had gone through, he wasn't looking for a relationship AT ALL, but despite that we immediately clicked and from the day we met, talked every single day either by text of phone call practically up until he deployed again in March of the following year. Now, with all that being said, it was mid-May when we met and he asked me if I wanted to be his gf officially towards the end of June. We had only seen each other twice in that period of time, because a week after we met, he went to California & Ohio for his post-tour 30 days leave (I'm in Georgia). I agreed, and we worked out the logistics from there. We lived 250 miles apart from each other at that period of time and we also knew that beginning of October the Army was sending him to Texas. We sat down and talked (on the phone) about whether we wanted to continue building our relationship as it was and try to work it out long distance with him in Texas, if we wanted to scale back and just be friends, or if we wanted to date casually over the summer and revert to just friends once he moved to Texas. After *several* long talks about it, we decided that we didn't want to scale back, and wanted to keep building our relationship, we would decide what was going to happen when he moved to Texas closer to time. Well, by end of August he'd already told me he loved me, so obviously we were going to try to make the long distance work. He moved in October, I visited in December (day after Christmas through New Years) and again in February (right before Valentine's Day) with him buying my first ticket and my dad offering to pay half for the 2nd ticket so that I could see him again before he deployed. He deployed in March, I graduated with my Master's in August. I started looking for jobs in Texas and moved out there the week before he came back from deployment. We lived in Texas until October of last year when his contract with the Army ended and moved back to Georgia to be near my family. We bought a house in December and he proposed in January.
So I guess my point is, if you sit down and talk about everything. About where you stand and what the "guidelines" are during his deployment, so to speak, you can absolutely make it work if it is meant to be.
Good luck! Stick around and keep us posted :-)

First, welcome to the board. I apologize for taking awhile to respond to your post (my son and I are both dealing with what I'm positively convinced is the worst cold ever to afflict anyone), but I'm glad some of the other ladies were able to help.

The simple truth is that whether a relationship involves the challenges set forth by the military or challenges that can be found in any relationship, there are no guarantees. Even if he worked a regular 9-5 job with minimal risk a block from your house, you could devote yourself to the relationship 8 days, 8 weeks, 8 months, or even 8 years and still be hurt in the end. Love, like many other things that make life worth living, involves risk.