My (26M) girlfriend (27F) of 11 months dumped while I was away at training. How do I recover from this and where do I go from here?
TLDR: I got dumped over a 10 minute phone call after 11 months together because I’m military and distance was too much for her to handle and I am wondering how people recover from these sorts of situations like I’m in and how does one navigate military dating in the future
Hey, guys, tried posting on a throwaway but didn’t work so posting on main and hoping nobody I know sees or guesses it’s me. For context, I’m military and in one of the hardest training pipelines out of all the services (~2 years long give or take). I left home back in August while she stayed back home. I’m no stranger to long-distance since I did it in college a long time ago and she has an awesome stable well-paying job which is why I felt this could work because there wasn’t a worry about whether or not she could be self-sufficient while I was gone.
I know our relationship wasn’t even for a year, but this was the first time in a relationship where I hit the point where I told myself “I’m gonna marry this girl when I get out of here.” I felt like I did my part on making sure the distance was as easy as it could be, because I knew the onus was on me to put in the effort while I was away. I planned virtual dates, we played partner games over the phone, I would send flowers or letters because I felt like it, and we weren’t obsessed about communication quantity. Just a single phone call every night rather than texting constantly all day every day was more than enough. I thought that this was enough because she wrote me letters and sent me postcards all while I was away during boot camp too and supported me while I was in a limbo status after graduating from boot camp. And we even spent all of my 2 week holiday leave together when I came back home.
About a month ago, however one day I noticed she was more down than usual during our call and I didn’t want to prod because we were scheduling her to visit me soon and I didn’t want to create stress by having any crazy convos over the phone like that, but the next day she called me out of nowhere saying that the distance was too much for her and she couldn’t do it anymore. I was just stunned and couldn’t really say much except for “are you sure?” So 10 minutes later I was newly single. I thought I was dealing with it healthily, but I think about it more often now and it’s hard. Here’s where my request for advice comes in (especially any military members or vets in this sub): where do I go from here or how do I navigate this?
I more than keep myself busy during the weeks with my studies and I would actually say I’ve been performing better since the breakup, but I get hit with these huge mood swings on the weekends when there’s nothing to distract me from my thoughts. I also start getting anxious thinking about the future, because the career field is the same job my dad had, and I remember how often he could leave at the drop of a hat, but he always made it work, even with our whole family for 20 years. But I think to myself “what girl is gonna want to put up with me and this job” where I know the kind of work and time away it involves. Especially with how unfavorably the military is viewed now I know it’s not everybody’s cup of tea, but I was in a super bad financial spot before this which is why I joined.
So for anybody in a similar situation (military or not) if you’ve been in this situation how did you recover? How did you move forward when things felt like they were getting worse and what did you do in the future to help? Sorry for the long post, and hopefully I followed all the sub rules, but thank you guys for reading. TLDR is up top for easy acces