Our love story – the Army version

In honor of Valentine’s Day, I’m linking up with Jo @ Jo My Gosh and Jessica @ MBB for their Lima. Oscar. Victor. Echo. military love link-up.

Mac and I met almost five (!!!) years ago in March of 2009 at a party in college. What seemed like a casual encounter wound up being the beginning of an amazing adventure. We started dating within a week of meeting, and Mac was very up front about his military career. He was commissioning in May and would be moving to three different duty stations within a year. At first, Mac was a bit reluctant for us to start dating because of his Army commitment. I told him I thought we should give it a shot, and we wouldn’t regret not dating if we later broke up.

Our first formal

At the end of May, Mac loaded up his car to move out to Fort Lewis in Washington for the summer. He had been selected to work at LDAC, basically an Army summer camp for ROTC cadets, because the colonel in charge that year ran the Army ROTC program at Tech. He picked me up in Pennsylvania, and we were off on our first road trip.

I flew back to PA for the summer and then returned to Fort Lewis in August to road trip down to Fort Sill where Mac was starting BOLC / OBC, the “how to be an Army artillery officer” course for newly-minted second lieutenants. I then went back to Blacksburg for my senior year. We visited each other several times over the course of that school year. He came to Blacksburg twice, and I went to Lawton twice. Mac knew he would be assigned to an artillery unit at Fort Bragg after he finished OBC in May. We were both pretty committed to our relationship after that first year, so we started talking about the next step for us after I graduated in May of 2010.

Before Mac and I met, I had been looking at attending graduate school. One of my top choices was North Carolina State in Raleigh. After we began dating, NC State seemed like a good opportunity for us to be together. Over the course of my senior year, I realized that I was not at all motivated to continue on to grad school, so I slowly shifted my focus to finding a job. At that point, I was looking and applying for jobs everywhere, including North Carolina and Pennsylvania. I wound up interviewing for and accepting a job in North Carolina, so we decided to move in together (and with my future brother-in-law).

Shortly after we got to North Carolina in June, Mac was assigned to a different unit that would deploying in December. After the shock settled, we prepared for it. Marriage had come up a few times (we even talked about a wedding on 10-10-10), but nothing ever went further than talking. The Friday before he left, we went to the mall to buy me a Christmas present. At his urging, I started trying on engagement rings (cue minor panic attack). He proposed on December 5, 2010, the day before he left for his first year-long tour in Afghanistan . That deployment was hard, but it also helped us realize how important our relationship was. I think our love grew stronger as a result.

We were legally married a week after he came back on December 15, 2011, and we had our actual wedding about six months later on June 9, 2012. We slugged through one final year at Fort Bragg, and our first wedding anniversary in June 2013 saw us off to Fort Gordon so Mac could attend the Signal Corps Career Course. While we were there, Mac sorted through the list of potential jobs (and homes) and wound up being assigned to a unit based overseas. It wasn’t an ideal situation for either of us, but we managed to focus on the positives of another deployment.

So that brings our love story to today, five years and 1.1 deployments later.