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I'm a former military wife. Just trying to explain how military life is different to other Americans was insanely hard. I lived in the same country. I used the

I'm a former military wife. Just trying to explain how military life is different to other Americans was insanely hard. I lived in the same country. I used the same currency. I spoke the same language. Yet my life was not like that of civilians I knew and their underlying assumptions and mine that informed our decisions just did not match up to such a degree that I eventually stopped trying to explain my life choices even to people quite close to me who simply did not get the context and that their decision-making matrix and mine were largely unrelated. I wish you luck in trying to figure out how to do this.

sombremesa 5y ago
Thanks...I think I'm going to give up before I even start. The gap is far wider than I had ever imagined.
alisonkisk 5y ago
It's not possible to make people understand. You can try it understand others, and some others can try to understand you, but you can't make someone's open their mind if they don't want to.
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- wombatmobile 5y ago
  To help people understand something they've never experienced, stay within their own frame of reference. That's all they've got to work with, because they don't know what they haven't experienced. To explain poverty to a middle class Californian, frame it in culture terms that are familiar, but which still reach the same class of emotional experience you want them to understand. e.g. Have you ever gone shopping at The Gap for jeans with a bunch of pals, and they take forever to decide which 12 pairs of jeans they're going to get, but you only take like 20 minutes because you can only afford 4 pairs? You know how that feels? They'll catch on.
  - asah 5y ago
    Well written novels help...
rendall 5y ago
That's interesting. Would you mind giving an example of one of these disjuncts? Some decision you made as a military wife that others did not understand?
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- alarge 5y ago
  I'm obviously not Doreen, but I was a military brat and military myself and can relate some of what I saw. First off, there's a sense of impermanence to everything. Your best friend is often someone you will only know for ~3 years of your life. You have to meet people and become friendly with them quickly or you will have no social contacts outside your family. If you were a military spouse, you may have had a job, but rarely a career. You move at the whim of your spouse's job (every few years) to places you don't control. You generally don't get to pick your neighbors or even your friends - you just adapt to the situation that constantly changes. Spouses of military members that go on unaccompanied tours have it even worse. They are at home alone, often for months at a time. My anecdotal observations of Navy spouses, for example, was that cheating was a standard practice - not because the marriage was necessarily bad, but because they were so lonely. This is based on limited exposure (I was Air Force, both as a brat and active duty), so may not be as universally true as I observed. This can all sound horrible, but it really wasn't. Just different. Different enough that sometimes it is hard to explain.
- salynchnew 5y ago
  The incentive structure in the military is completely different from normal American society. Imagine a parallel, "socialist" society that exists inside the U.S.A. That's the military in a nutshell. It has its own government-run housing authority, its own government-run medical system, you don't always know where you will end up on your next tour, you may not be allowed to quit and leave the military when you would normally expect to under some circumstances, etc.
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sombremesa 5y ago

Thanks...I think I'm going to give up before I even start. The gap is far wider than I had ever imagined.

alisonkisk 5y ago

It's not possible to make people understand. You can try it understand others, and some others can try to understand you, but you can't make someone's open their mind if they don't want to.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
wombatmobile 5y ago
To help people understand something they've never experienced, stay within their own frame of reference. That's all they've got to work with, because they don't know what they haven't experienced. To explain poverty to a middle class Californian, frame it in culture terms that are familiar, but which still reach the same class of emotional experience you want them to understand. e.g. Have you ever gone shopping at The Gap for jeans with a bunch of pals, and they take forever to decide which 12 pairs of jeans they're going to get, but you only take like 20 minutes because you can only afford 4 pairs? You know how that feels? They'll catch on.
- asah 5y ago
  Well written novels help...

rendall 5y ago

That's interesting. Would you mind giving an example of one of these disjuncts? Some decision you made as a military wife that others did not understand?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alarge 5y ago
I'm obviously not Doreen, but I was a military brat and military myself and can relate some of what I saw. First off, there's a sense of impermanence to everything. Your best friend is often someone you will only know for ~3 years of your life. You have to meet people and become friendly with them quickly or you will have no social contacts outside your family. If you were a military spouse, you may have had a job, but rarely a career. You move at the whim of your spouse's job (every few years) to places you don't control. You generally don't get to pick your neighbors or even your friends - you just adapt to the situation that constantly changes. Spouses of military members that go on unaccompanied tours have it even worse. They are at home alone, often for months at a time. My anecdotal observations of Navy spouses, for example, was that cheating was a standard practice - not because the marriage was necessarily bad, but because they were so lonely. This is based on limited exposure (I was Air Force, both as a brat and active duty), so may not be as universally true as I observed. This can all sound horrible, but it really wasn't. Just different. Different enough that sometimes it is hard to explain.
salynchnew 5y ago
The incentive structure in the military is completely different from normal American society. Imagine a parallel, "socialist" society that exists inside the U.S.A. That's the military in a nutshell. It has its own government-run housing authority, its own government-run medical system, you don't always know where you will end up on your next tour, you may not be allowed to quit and leave the military when you would normally expect to under some circumstances, etc.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]