i really need some good advice here...

flyboy

10-Year Member
5-Year Member
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Nov 18, 2007
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207
hey everybody,
so i just asked this girl who is acquantance of mine out tonight. we have a lot and common and we really hit it off and all, its just that i don't want this to hinder my future if i get an appointment!! i believe that this can be a good thing, that i can learn and grow from the experience (especially since this is my first time), and that i really can gain something from it. she knows my situation and IS OKAY with it, but i'm not stupid and know it is still a slipperly slope. is my approach to this issue okay? is this a good idea to begin with? thanks for the help :)
 
Perplexing question, but I do believe future cadets at all academies are allowed to have dates. I certainly hope so, at least, as the prom is next week and I just paid for son's tux....
 
flyboy,

I am sure that as soon as she finds out that you have broadcast it all over the internet, you will find that you no longer have a problem.
 
Listen to this man.

Edit: Don't worry about it. Why would a girlfriend hinder you getting an appointment?
 
Flyboy, my DS is in a similar situation, dating a girl he cares for very much (and vica versa) for over 8 months now. They are very aware of the challenges their relationship will face if he is accepted to the AFA. Long distance relationships are never easy, especially when there will be periods such as BCT when you will have NO contact, or will have limited access to cell phones and IM (never mind being 1000’s of miles away:mad:).

The way I see it, there are multiple possibilities here. 1) You date a while, things seem hot and heavy at first, then suddenly THE FIGHT happens (usually for a stupid reason), and you break up (Note: this is the typical teen-age romance scenario). 2) You date even longer, you both go off to college, and suddenly you both seem to just “drift apart”. You break up over the phone, then go out with your buddies later that night to “celebrate your freedom / act p***’d off”. 3) You date all the way to I-day, where both of you decide a couple of days later to just “be friends” because of the challenges of long distance dating. (Hurts? Yeah, but she will at least be your friend and someone you can talk to when life at the academy gets you down. Who knows? You may even hook up again at times when your home.:thumb:) 4) This is THE ONE, your soul-mate, best friend, and whole world. If this is the case, you MAKE IT HAPPEN together. She understands, and counts down the days when she can come out to visit. You go to dances and functions where guests are allowed together. She is the rock that keeps you motivated and grounded when you’re down, through daily e-mails and phone calls. Finally, after 4 long years, you may even end up with a REAL BUSY Grad day, as your wedding in the AFA Chapel happens that weekend as well. :biggrin: (OK, to be honest, the likelihood of this happening is remote. This is a teenage romance, and your first. Odds are against you. But it does happen. Pima and I are a great example of a couple who made it through 5 years of a long distance relationship (college (2 hours away) and UNT (opposite coasts!). But we are not the typical result. We were (and still are) just that much in love to make it through the trials.)

Now, in your boat, al I can say is: “WHY NOT?”. No need right now to look 5 years down the road. Enjoy life as a teen-ager, and all that goes with it, now. Goodness knows, in a few months that life will end! Bottom Line: GO FOR IT! :thumb: Enjoy the time together, and let the pieces fall where they may.

And USNA69, don't you know that in this day and age of MYSPACE and IM’ing, what flyboy posted was veeeeery typical teen-age discussion. :biggrin: Heaven knows, that in my house (with 3 teenagers), I’ve seen it all on the Myspace pages of theirs and their friends! :eek:
 
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They refer to it as the 2% club.

Spouse had a girl when he went to the zoo. Durning the # degree year they broke up. It good to have someone to write to while going through beast. My spouse will say cadets have it easier than in the 80s. Typewriters were hi-tech, he would have killed to have MS Office as a cadet. Cell phones, no having to go to the CQ desk to hear the GF break up with you for the 4th time. There was no music until "he77 week" and it wasn't until just before graduation. But then he knows that he starts to sound like the guys that dodo makes fun of (the guys who railed against women ever going to USAFA who now push their daughters to go).
 
thanks for the advice everyone. the reason i am so concerned is because i have seen a lot of my older friends get distracted from their future goals because of a girl, and usually a girl that they leave soon after. i do not want that to be me, and i just wanted to make sure that good can come out of a relationship like this. so, if things work out between me and her, i will run with it and see what happens.
 
Well, I really don't have any advice, but I thought I'd just say Congratulations on the girlfriend!!:cool::thumb: Good Luck with whatever you decide!
 
i will definitely be doing that mom3boys.

and she isn't my girlfriend yet, lol, but there is definitely potential :)
 
Have fun and enjoy yourself. Let what happens happen. But, (my opinion only), do NOT let a girl stop you from going to USAFA or distracting you while you're at USAFA and living your dreams now.
 
Have fun and enjoy yourself. Let what happens happen. But, (my opinion only), do NOT let a girl stop you from going to USAFA or distracting you while you're at USAFA and living your dreams now.

Listen to this man. He speaks God's own Truth on the subject.

I would have been far more blunt. If you can swing the relationship, then by all means do so. If she becomes an impediment to your USAFA goals, then ditch the *****.

And before anyone thinks I'm being sexist, the advice would be EXACTLY the same if the roles were reversed, except the expletive would be gender-specific toward the guy.

This is your future you're dealing with. Trust me, whatever you think "love" and "commitment" is today is child's play compared to what Real Life will throw at you later. Get your life firmly on track NOW and THEN worry about the icing on the cake.

I've seen too many people ruin their young lives over a boyfriend or girlfriend. :frown:
 
Okay....wifey speaking.

As Bullet said we dated through all of our college years long distance...our engagement yr was spent on two coasts. To this day that is Bullets advice to our boys...propose and leave town, come back for the wedding:shake:and never have to deal with any of it.

My advice....date the girl do not ask what if? If she can't handle the seperation, call it a day. Will it hurt to end it, of course, but staying together will be worse.

Only a few months ago I had a very long conversation with DS's girlfriend. I explained to her, that this is going to be very hard, and explained that there are couples known as the 2%, so it can happen, but it is few and far between.

She asked how Bullet and I made it (we only saw ea. other every 6 weeks for a weekend)....answer trust. I had to believe when he said I got to go and studying, that he was doing that and not blowing me off. When I called and heard laughter in the background, I had to remember he had a life also and not sitting there pining for me, just as I was living my life.

The only thing I will really state is CHOSE WISELY. I have seen and known too many wives that freak out when DH is deployed, True Story: 1st Op. Base we were assigned to while they were deployed for a WTD a wife called the desk and said I'm out of gas, the Lt thought she was stuck on the road and asked where are you? Home, ok, we'll bring some gas out to you, (now thinking she was ditz), then she said that won't help I don't know how to pump gas. The officer got in trouble for leaving his wife in USAFE without knowing how to pump gas, and not telling the command her "needs".

I on the other hand at the exact same time, got a flat tire on the road, with our 6 mos. old and changed it myself. Bullet has never worried about our family while he was gone, I only rely on him when I am treated like a third class citizen...very frustrating as a spouse not to be able to get an appt.

If any girl you are involved with can't survive on her own, than run, do not walk. This life is about taking jets to safety for hurricanes but leaving your family behind. It is about working 12 hr shifts at weird hours and not being to help get child 1 to soccer, child 2 to dance and child 3 to piano in an hr. period. Surviving without household goods (incl. clothes) for mos. at a time. It is about her putting your home up for sale more than once while you are deployed. With all of that, I haven't even touched the bad juju of remotes, plane crashes and bad land deployments

Find a girl who is willing to be "the other woman", because afterall for as long as you serve, the AF will be your number 1 girl:wink: When you find her, than you will be a member of the 2% club.

I hope that all of this makes the guys think about what her life will be like, and what kind of woman you will need to stand by your side for a successful career and marriage.

I am proud to be Bullet's mistress, and happy that he loves both of us:smile: As corny as it sounds, I love the fact that he loves this life. How many people in the world can say "I can't believe they pay me to do this" I don't listen anymore b/c he has said it so often. He loves putting on the flight suit, and even when he was at the puzzle palace wearing the blue, he still loved it. It is easy to be Mom, Dad and the handyman when you know that the person you love is happy. Believe it or not it makes wives okay with all of the crap we endure.

PS don't even consider being with a girl who says I can't imagine ever living away from my family...it's a career killer. Trust me, I know several spouses who chose their AD spouses decision on their next base. I.E. I can't get a job there, or I don't want to live overseas, forget about going to AK I hate the cold.
 
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PS don't even consider being with a girl who says I can't imagine ever living away from my family...it's a career killer.

...and not just in the military.

Ask me how I know. :mad:
 
Flyboy,

Think of this as a challenge in multitasking, something you'll need to do well at the Academy and in the military. If a girl will mess you up trying to get the appointment, she's not worth it. If she can be helpful and keep you on the right track she's one of a few (at a young age anyway) and a keeper.

And a little bit of advice from someone who is probably too picky. I know this is the internet, but you should practice proper capitalization and punctuation now, so you don't slip up later. :wink:
 
Also do not assume this is the last time a girl could "mess you up". Relationships can be tough, add on the lack of time at an academy with the pressures and it doesn't help much.


As far as capitalization is concerned, if you want to be safe, just capitalize everything like message traffic or logs...of not. When I get an email from someone who was probably typing out a message and left the caps locks on, I always think they're yelling.
 
Off thread now...don't worry about cap/punct. unless it looks like a 4 yr old wrote it...my fingers type faster than my mind, and I always hit the post prior to re-reading. This is a friendly forum, nobody expects perfection...that is why the edit button exists:shake:

I do agree to a point, it is good to get yourself into a pattern to always double check...nothing looks worse than when you hand in a report and dropped a letter, i.e. the should have been then, or shout should have been shot...spell checker will not help in that situation :rolleyes:
 
I think Cougar probably remembers this very conversatin from last year.

If you are looking for advice from me, write in full sentences with proper punctuation. I scan rather rapidly. No caps, no periods, no sentence structure is like a stop sign to me. After about the second stop sign, ninety perceont of the time I go on to the next post. I figure that anyone in their haste to communicate that doesn't have time to do it correctly, thus causing me extra time to decipher their post, doesn't really need my advice anyway.
 
And USNA69, don't you know that in this day and age of MYSPACE and IM’ing, what flyboy posted was veeeeery typical teen-age discussion. Heaven knows, that in my house (with 3 teenagers), I’ve seen it all on the Myspace pages of theirs and their friends!

Bullet, I certainly hope that you have trained your 3 teenagers such that when they have sex for the first time that they don't disseminate it to the world within six hours.
 
USNA69, you are correct to a point. If my children were posting to THAT level, they can expect either PIMA or myself to come down on them with righteous wrath, and they wouldn't be touching a computer again until they were in college!

But no, this thread started by flyboy was more on the "Dear Abby" level versus the "Dateline- To Catch a Predator" level. Innocent questions such as "Does she like me?", "should I ask her out?" are common on the social networks (and Goodness knows, I'd rather have my children asking those questions on a place like this, with mature adults viewing and responding, than on a MYSPACE page where the viewers' average age is 14, and have very little experience in life). These forums have now become the "school hallway" conversation we lived through in our day (but on a slightly larger scale, of course)

His questions and concerns were innocent enough, and never even came close to the level your suggesting above. If it ever came to that, I hope ALL the parents on here would have the thread deleted immediately....
 
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