When my cousin David was getting married, I already had 5 years of marriage under my belt, and so he asked me if I had any advice about the key to a good marriage. By then, I had seriously considered that topic before, and I enthusiastically told him, "Communication."
Since I am a Navy wife who is used to frequent separation and long deployments, that answer might seem ironic.
We fortunately live in the electronic age, and I can't pretend that I don't take it for granted most of the time. I can't imagine how life was for wives who waited for letters in the mailbox from their husbands. Just this week, frustrated by an inbox full of retail newsletters and no messages from my husband, I found myself thinking, can't aircraft carriers set up wireless networks already?! Am I naive to hope that maybe the day will soon come?
Maintaining a marriage via email means making the effort to type out your thoughts and feelings, frequently, and carefully, and then be patient while waiting for response.
I say it takes effort, because it takes energy and dedication to remember and articulate all the things you want to discuss with your husband throughout the day. You have to make time to sit at the computer, often at night, after the kids are in bed, when you are too tired to even find the remote to turn off the TV let alone capitalize or punctuate a sentence.
I say "frequently" because distance is the worst thing for a marriage. My husband and I can be on opposite sides of the world, but we write frequently about what's on our minds and hearts so that we stay close.
I say "carefully" because it is notoriously hard to read emotion in an email, despite emoticons and smileys. Misinterpreting spouses' signals is a common problem in person, let alone in print.
I am pretty good at the "careful" part. I'm always resolving to improve at the "frequent" part. But I'll confess that I am lousy at the "patient" part.
We are not perfect, but I think my husband and I have a pretty healthy and happy email relationship. We've kept it going for six deployments so far. Here are a few tips that work for us:
We don't fight via email. Which is odd, because we are big bicker-ers over day-to-day, trivial things like how much chili powder to put in the chili, how loud the TV should be, or the fastest route to take to get on the interstate. But as deployment nears, the bickering stops. We have only ever had one fight via email, when I was 8 1/2 months pregnant, and I cried for two days. We won't make that mistake again.
We balance laundry-list messages with personal messages. There are always household and financial things to discuss, but if the only message you get in a day is about the bills and the lawn and renewing the car tags, you feel pretty cheated. You have to go over that stuff, but I always like to immediately follow it with a second, thoughtful email about a specific time you missed them that day, or looking forward to doing something special with them, or some sweet and funny things the kids did.
We make each other smile. Or smirk. You gotta have a sense of humor, and do a little e-flirting.
This deployment, I have a Blackberry, which makes it easy for me to send several quick messages per day. But it also means I can obsessively check for replies far too many times a day than I can count. If only my husband could write to me as often as Barnes and Noble does.
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