Where do I put my broken heart: getting dumped during deployment

There’s the battlefield and then there’s this.

There is a range of emotions that a man or woman can feel when they find out that their relationship has gone belly up. There’s anger, disappointment, resentment and more. Finding out that your relationship has fallen apart is hard no matter where a person is, but it’s harder when you are stuck in a warzone.

So, what do you do?

Find clarity

There are a number of reasons that someone may choose to end a relationship. The best thing you can do is find a way to get closure. The worst thing that can happen is if you spend all your time sitting around wondering what went wrong. Sometimes people aren’t able to handle the distance, but other times it’s possible they just met someone else. It would make no sense for you to beat yourself up about how far away you are or hold onto false hope.

Say no to denial

Service personnel are tough people. They bite into enemies for a living. It can make them feel like they don’t need to acknowledge that they feel at all. Granted that the best thing you can do is keep yourself busy and move forward, but don’t do it in a manner that puts your feelings in an unhealthy box.

Keep talking

Before you were deployed you had a support system at home. You had friends, you had family – heck you may even have had co-workers you could talk to all day. There is no reason for you to not connect with people back home to find some comfort. So, give yourself the space to be human and reconnect with people who love to lend you their ear. People back home are essentially your comfort zone, the safe space that you know you can rely on.

Find support around you

You can start by talking to people you know back home, but you shouldn’t completely write off the men and women serving with you. If anything, these are the people that understand what you may be going through most. The kind of empathy and insight they can provide cannot be compared to the advice or comfort you can get from talking to a best friend back home who has never been deployed. Find strength from those around you.

A break up during deployment can be very hard to deal with for the one who’s out fighting a literal war. While the partner back home has the option of hanging out with their friends or distracting themselves with a new hobby, the one who is deployed ends up with the shorter end of the stick. That does not mean that they can’t find their own system to help deal with the heartbreak.
Make sure that you give yourself space to get over your relationship ending!