Maintaining Friendships When Your Spouse is Deployed
Dealing with begin the third wheel.
by Whitney Bailey
Like many military spouses, I didn’t realize how much of a part my husband played in our friendships until he was deployed. We spent most of our time with other married or dating couples and when he left, this dynamic seemed to fall apart. The same people who invited us out regularly for dinner never thought to invite just me. Soon my weekend nights were spent alone and I wondered if I could make it through a friendless deployment.
One day I ran into a couple of friends and we politely made chit-chat. I was silently wishing that they’d invite me over for dinner when one said, “Well, when he gets back, give us a call and we’ll all go out.”
Out of sheer frustration and loneliness I blurted, “We’re not a package deal! You can invite just me!” Probably not my finest or politest moment, but it worked.
While I really didn’t want to be a third wheel, I was only able to keep up those friendships by embracing it. So I started picking up the phone and inviting myself.
Soon, I was back to hanging out with friends, and even getting to know them better than I had before. I had dinner parties and asked both couples and single friends. Before I would have kept the two groups separate but now I was vowing to embrace their differences. And I spoke openly to others about my frustrations of feeling like no one wanted to spend time with me without my husband.
Once I started inviting myself, or extending invitations, I discovered that many of our friends had simply assumed that everyone was inviting me over and that I was always busy. I heard, “I thought you always spent Sunday afternoons with your in-laws” and “I would have invited you over to watch the game but assumed someone else had already asked you.” With this information in hand I realized that most people weren’t purposefully avoiding me. Instead they actually thought I was too busy to bother!
I also learned that many of our friends were simply unsure of what to talk about with me. Like the elephant in the room, they were afraid to ask about my husband or the war in Iraq. Some felt that was the only thing they knew to talk about. Rather than waiting for others to ask about my husband, I soon began to give them a brief update at the beginning of the conversation, and then changed the subject. To others, I was able to be more honest and blunt and simply stated, “I don’t want to talk about the war.”
When my husband returned from his deployment, we fell back into the old routines and friendships and I was no longer the third wheel. We’d lost a few friends along the way – the ones that just couldn’t seem to make time for me – but those were few and far between. And the people that had learned to accept me as a single friend and not a package deal were really the only friends we wanted anyway.