Not sure if this is the best site to do this since I’m not going to college, but I’m kinda nervous. I’m shipping off to boot camp August 8th and my girlfriend is going to ESU. Has anyone ever been in this situation and how hard is it? Is ESU a party school? and she is going to be on the track team so I’m not sure how much free time she will have to talk.
She is not the one that won’t have free time lol. You won’t be able to talk on the phone much in Boot camp. You have to earn phone privileges even then it’s few and far in between.
As a Recruit (not technically a Marine yet) in bootcamp, the last time you even see a phone is the night you arrive on the depot. You’ll be writing lots of letters home for 13 weeks instead. Do yourself a favor, and ask your girlfriend not to adorn her letters to you in any unusual designs, colors, or scents.
Seriously, you’ll be away from all other communication to the outside world for bootcamp, so it’s critical that she communicate with you via snail-mail for her first semester. After bootcamp, you’ll have a very short leave (vacation) period of 10 days, but then you have to report to your job training. At least once at your job training, you’ll be able to have a cell phone, computer, etc to communicate on your free time, which is generally just the weekends (and some evenings depending on your MOS). Bonus if your training location is a close enough drive to see her on long weekends.
Pro tip: if she sticks with you through a deployment, maybe even two, then consider her a keeper.
Although I was older, I did this in reverse. I headed off to graduate school the week after my then-boyfriend headed to the Air Force. Different states, of course.
It’s a bit rough, but there are many many many people who do long-distance relationships from the military!
You won’t be able to talk on the phone during basic (you do get one phone call like halfway through), but you CAN write letters. I wrote my boyfriend letters during basic and he wrote me back. It was kind of romantic! And I broke all those rules about colors and scents and designs, lol. I had no idea they were even a thing. I sent the letters in really colorful neon envelopes, sometimes I drew corny stuff on the front, and apparently he got a lot of good-natured teasing about it because his TI could always tell when he got a new letter immediately from the color! I flew down to the base to see his basic graduation. I also sprayed them with perfume from time to time and my boyfriend wrote that he liked it and didn’t get into any trouble about it. So I’m not sure whether things are different from service to service or not, but the colors and scents weren’t an issue.
He earned some special honors so he was allowed to go off-base twice during the graduation period instead of once, but he wasn’t allowed to do any PDA - we got yelled at by a random passing airman for holding hands on base! I was able to go around the city with him and do stuff though, and we got to talk.
My boyfriend didn’t get leave before he went to tech school (which is what the AF calls the job training). His tech school was not close enough to drive - it was in the Midwest while I was in the Northeast. But he did have more free time and privileges to talk on the phone. His tech school was also relatively short - something like 2-3 months. And then we got really lucky and he got stationed in the Northeast, a 2-hour drive from me and a place easily accessible by train! (There are additional considerations after that, too. Like you can’t just leave or take off whenever you want to, and you can get deployed on relatively short notice. Deployments were, in terms of communication, somewhat easier than basic because at least then we could Skype, although we had to figure out the time difference and some really bad connections.)
If you are both patient and trusting and have a strong foundation on which to build, you can do a long-distance military relationship.
What’s ESU? East Stroudsburg University? Emporia State University?