Friendship: A Reason, Season, and a Lifetime

PCS season has arrived. Once again, we find ourselves packing and getting ready to move or maybe staying put yet still saying goodbye to friends and neighbors. This is the cycle we military families endure every year. Our friendships ebb and flow with PCS moves, deployments, and life events. We push feelings of sadness and grief away, and the promise to stay in touch (We’re Facebook friends! I’ll text all the time!) echoes of a closeness that we are unsure will stay firmly intact after we separate to new locations.

These are military friendships. They burn hard and fast. We don’t have time for long-term sustained experiences or the slow growth of friendship, so our military life forces us to assume friendship “rules of engagement” and hard truths.

We understand each other’s struggles/lifestyle/story because we are military.

The needs of the military often come first and affect our ability to be present and available.

We will do what we can to help take care of each other because we know our lifestyle can be trying.

At some point, this relationship will change because of our military life, and we’re going to be okay with that.

I’ve been involved in many conversations this past month about community and connecting and friendships, and what I heard was an overwhelming desire that military friendships be more. More meaningful, longer-lasting, deeper, stronger, easier…

Friends for a Reason

Consider a few lines from the poem, “Reason, Season and a Lifetime” by Brian A. “Drew” Chalker:

“When someone is in your life for a reason, it is usually to meet a need you have expressed outwardly or inwardly. They have come to assist you through a difficulty, or to provide you with guidance and support, to aid you physically, emotionally, or even spiritually. They may seem like a godsend to you, and they are. They are there for a reason, you need them to be.”

Isn’t this exactly what so many military friendships are? We often feel we meet for a reason. The oldest and greatest example is two military spouses using each other as emergency contacts for their children within minutes of meeting. Will this friendship endure? Perhaps it will…maybe it won’t…but in that time and at that moment you had a friend for a reason.

Friends for a Season

Then Chalker describes friends of a season:

“When people come into your life for a season, it is because your turn has come to share, grow, or learn. They may bring you an experience of peace or make you laugh. They may teach you something you have never done. They usually give you an unbelievable amount of joy.“

But wait! That’s also a perfect description of so many military friendships. We meet haphazardly at a USO event or
a mandatory fun family picnic or at Starbucks. That first conversation blossoms into a friendship that we know may not stand the test of military life. We share our experiences and help each other grow. We build each other up and try new things, new places, and have new adventures together. And we find happiness and joy in each other’s successes for the season we are together.

Friends for a Lifetime

Finally, Chalker describes friends for a lifetime:

“Lifetime relationships teach you a lifetime of lessons; those things you must build upon in order to have a solid emotional foundation. Your job is to accept the lesson, love the person/people (anyway), and put what you have learned to use in all other relationships and areas in your life.”

And once again we find ourselves full circle, nodding our heads that yes, military friendships are also friends of a lifetime. Who else can commiserate over 10 moves in 20 years? Who else understands the trials of a service member coming home from deployment and that process of learning to live with each other again? Who else understands the military foundation that a huge chunk of your life has been built on? The answer is simple—other military spouses, other service members, and other military children. And so we find ourselves with friends for a lifetime that provide the emotional understanding that is so needed to deal with the aftermath of wars and deployments and moving and loss and so much more.

So, my dear friends of a reason, season, and lifetime, remember that just because you are going separate ways, at duty stations near and far from each other, it does not mean the reasons that brought you together in the first place have no more value. Celebrate each kind of friendship you’ve made and find joy that there is a new group of people that will enter your life and support you for a reason, a season, and a lifetime.