In a world where relationships are traded in at regular intervals for newer, happier, sexier versions of themselves, it seems as though enduring love is difficult to find. According to Florence Dubay, a 32-year high school teacher, it is especially true of students going off to college. “Many [students] arrive [at school] involved in a serious relationship with someone who stays in their home town or goes away to another college. They leave, swearing their love to one another, only to find themselves torn away from the relationship by the attraction of a sea full of new faces.” Suddenly the old relationship falls apart, a new one begins just as promising as the last and the entire cycle of heartbreak begins again.
Sound familiar? Not to Renee, a 21-year-old from Maine who is a nursing major at Jefferson College in Watertown, New York.
Renee says a college student’s priorities are different when her “first and only love faces dying every single day.”
Renee graduated from Lawrence High School in 2002. She lives on Fort Drum Army Base in Watertown, N.Y with her husband of one year, whom she met when they were both just 13 years old. By couple’s second anniversary, Renee’s husband will be in Iraq, just behind the front lines, performing reconnaissance missions for the Army. She says he joined the Army, not because he felt “some kind of American responsibility to [join]” but because he had tried “the college thing, and the small-job thing” and found that none of them “suited him.”
The Army, she said, seemed like the wisest choice for a man who felt useless and lost.
“We knew when we started dating that we would get married someday. After I started college and felt motivated toward a goal for myself, I was like ‘So what are you going to do?'” said Renee. “When he chose the Army, we thought it was a solid career choice. That was before the war.”
The war, she said, frightens her to death. She believes it is the only thing that might destroy her marriage. “Living on base, going to a college that is 75 percent Army wives-well, it’s hard. That’s all there is to talk about: when [the soldiers are] leaving; how long they’ll be gone; how hard it will be if he dies. Wives obsess about it. It makes you a little paranoid, a little worried that maybe you won’t be able to make it through after all.”
“I worry, but unlike most of the other wives, I have a life of my own. My husband is not my life. I have goals. I don’t have to make myself around him. That’s not for me.” She is quick to add that she “fully support[s] his risking his life for America.”
She said she is prepared for him to leave, explaining that he regularly assures her that nothing will change while he’s gone. Though his promises help her feel better day-to-day, she harbors a secret fear of the “terrible loneliness” she will suffer when he finally leaves next fall.
Loneliness is nothing new to Renee. It was her only companion for the first six months she and her husband lived on base. “I thought, you know, we’d move there (I’d never been away from home, you know?) I’d start school and make all these friends, and be friends with ‘the wives’ and have fun. It didn’t really happen like that.” She found herself alone all too often. “He was working all the time and gone for a week at a time doing field missions. I started to go a little stir crazy.”
When her classes began, nothing changed. She expected students to be like they were at her old school in Maine: “fun, friendly, interesting.” But everyone was “just distant and strange.” “Nobody makes friends there [at Jefferson College]. People are friendly in class, but there are no friendships.” She found most of the girls her age were “more committed to being wives than they are to being social.” It is a mentality she cannot comprehend. “I love my husband. I love my marriage. But forgetting about what you need…to stay happy is no less important than being the ‘dedicated Army wife.'” According to Renee, it was the presence of so many of these “seriously competitive, seriously dedicated wives” on base that contributed to her feelings of loneliness most of all.
“I knew it was going to be hard to break into the on-base society the first day I went to the commissary [an on-base supply store] to buy groceries for dinner.” What she experienced there was unlike anything she ever experienced before. “As soon as I walked in, I was shocked. There were groups of expensively dressed women, all carrying the same Louis [Vuitton] bag, all with perfectly manicured nails, standing in groups, staring at me.”
According to Renee, they came up to her as she shopped, one by one, and introduced themselves not “by their names, but by their husband’s pay scale. Like, ‘Hi, my husband’s an O-4. What’s yours?’ I just said ‘My name’s Renee, what’s yours?’ They didn’t like that too much.” She believes her initial refusal that day of the “pre-set social pecking-order” is what caused her later ostracization by the group of women she now jokingly refers to as “The Hens.”
“Within the first week, a bunch of older hens came by to help me out. I thought they liked me.” They assisted her in getting acclimated to base life: showing her around, introducing her to other wives her age and inviting her to “FRG” (or Family Readiness Group) meetings. “[The meetings] are meant to psychologically prepare you for life without your husband. And to prepare you in case he dies. I didn’t want to go anymore once I found out about the…content [of the meetings].” She explained that “no matter what I think of the meetings or the women who run them, I still have to go [to meetings] when he gets shipped out. Everything is filtered through them [the wives]. If I want to know the daily comings and goings of my husband, I have to go through them.”
She says her decision not attend FRG was a social mistake. “As soon as I said ‘No, I’m all set. I’ll make friends on my own,’ they started ignoring me.” She remembers trying to talk to women in the street or at base-funded events with her husband and being “completely ignored.” “I felt like I was dealing with high school girls. The cliques are terrible.” But recently, things have changed for Renee.
A few months ago, two women moved into homes around the corner from her and her husband. They all met by accident in the street one day, she says with a laugh, “through our dogs.” She has become best friends with them over time, so much so that they have decided, as a group, not to participate in the larger part of the “wife social life” on base. She says, “They’re the same age as me, but they’ve been doing this [on-base life] for a few years more than I have. They learned already. They’re sick of ‘playing the game.’ So we aren’t going to.” Renee says they work out together, have girl’s movie nights every week and take stained-glass classes together. Most importantly, she says, is their support of one another as friends. “Whatever ‘preparation’ the [FRG] meetings are supposed to give me, I can get from [her girlfriends]. They respect my wanting to be my own person and they care about how his leaving will affect me emotionally instead of about how it will affect my being a ‘good Army wife’, whatever that means.”
Renee admits that despite her fear of “never seeing the love of [her] life again”, she maintains a strong face for him everyday. “No matter how scared I am, or how lonely I might get, I need to be tough. He’s the one risking his life, not me.” She knows the time without him will “test her every last nerve” but believes that she’ll end up “stronger and happier than other wives because I have my family, I have my friends and I have myself.”