At some point in every conversation with civilians, a military spouse will get the question: “How are you guys doing?”
It happens in the school pickup line, at the dentist’s office, during a FaceTime with a college roommate who now lives in a cul-de-sac where no one ever leaves for more than a business trip. It’s a normal, harmless question, unless your life is being held together with caffeine, duct tape, and the sheer force of will required to manage a household in your partner’s absence.
Then it’s a trap.
Because telling the truth would take too long. It would spill into a 40-minute story about broken appliances, meltdown-prone toddlers, delayed orders, and the fact that you’re still awake at 2 a.m. rage-updating a color-coded spreadsheet no one else will ever see. And you don’t have the time or the emotional energy to unravel all of that in line at Starbucks.
So you deploy the script. You roll out the polite phrases that sound breezy, resilient, even admirable. Civilians nod, smile, maybe even say, “Wow, I don’t know how you do it.” And you keep moving.
Here’s what those phrases sound like on the outside and what they really mean inside the life of a military spouse.
“We’re doing okay.”
This one is the standard issue, the polite opener, the answer you can deliver with a small smile that doesn’t invite follow-up questions.
To the outside world, “okay” suggests stability. Inside, it’s shorthand for: I cried in a CVS parking lot yesterday. Dinner was scavenged from whatever the kids didn’t finish. The trash can is too heavy to drag alone, so it’s been sitting for a week. But everyone’s alive, so sure, we’re all okay.
The truth is too messy to package neatly. “Okay” is the placeholder. It says: nothing’s on fire, I’m still standing, please don’t ask me for details.
“It’s just a training exercise.”
Civilians hear “training” and imagine summer camp with uniforms. A couple of weeks of drills, maybe some classroom work, nothing too disruptive.
What it actually means: the second your spouse left, the house began a coordinated attack. The fridge stopped cooling. The car battery died. The toddler caught a stomach bug that struck hardest at 3 a.m. You’ve been powering through on Goldfish crackers and iced coffee, and the dog is shedding like it’s his job.
There is no such thing as “just” an FTX. It’s all the chaos of deployment condensed into a shorter timeline, with none of the support systems that kick in when the separation is officially “long.”
“We’re used to it.”
This one deserves an award for Best Delivered Lie.
No one is ever used to the unpredictability, the stop-start rhythm, the cycle of goodbyes. What spouses get is practice. We become practiced at solo bedtime routines that stretch into months, practiced at hauling three kids through a grocery run while texting with a landlord about an uncertain move date, practiced at swallowing anxiety so we don’t scare the kids.
But “we’re used to it” is easier than saying, No, actually, it’s still hard every time. It doesn’t get easier. We just don’t have the luxury of falling apart in front of you.
“Hopefully we’ll know soon.”
Civilians hear this and nod sympathetically, imagining you’re waiting on something small,, like a delayed contractor or a backordered couch.
What it really means: there’s a spreadsheet open on your laptop with six possible timelines, three schools researched, two potential landlords, and not a single confirmed answer. It’s color-coded. Powered by rage. and it’s definitely updated every time a rumor floats through the unit group chat.
“Soon” is a polite fiction. Orders drag out for weeks, sometimes months. Families hang in limbo, unable to plan vacations, jobs, childcare, or even birthday parties. Saying “soon” is a way of closing the topic before you accidentally scream.
“It’s not that bad.”
If you ever hear this one, know that it is that bad.
But saying it out loud risks unraveling. “It’s not that bad” is the conversational duct tape that holds a spouse together in the moment. It pushes the truth, the exhaustion, the loneliness, the way every appliance seems to know when to fail, back down into a place where it won’t leak out at inconvenient times, like in the produce section of the commissary.
It’s not honesty. It’s survival.
“We’ve got a good community here.”
Sometimes this one’s true. Sometimes it’s wishful thinking.
On the surface, it’s the warm line civilians love to hear: military life may be hard, but look at that built-in support system. The reality is more complicated. Most spouses have exactly one friend they can text at midnight about anything. Everyone else is fine, but they’re not your emergency contact.
“We’ve got a good community here” is as much a prayer as a statement. It’s a way of glossing over the isolation without diving into the truth: that some duty stations feel like home, and others feel like exile.
“We know how to make it work.”
This is the closing line, the bow you tie on a story that doesn’t really have an ending.
Translation: The bills are paid, the kids are alive, and we’ve avoided serving Pop-Tarts for dinner three nights in a row. That’s the bar. That’s the win.
It’s not a lie, exactly. It’s the only way to sum up the messy middle ground between thriving and falling apart.
Why the words get said
We edit because the real story is too long, too messy, too heavy to drop into casual conversation. We edit because most civilians don’t really want the truth. They want the highlight reel version that makes us look strong, resilient, inspirational.
We edit because sometimes telling the truth makes it harder to keep going.
So we save the raw story for the people who already understand—the spouse friend who knows the shorthand, the group chat that doesn’t need context, the late-night phone call when you can finally say it’s not okay. To everyone else, we deploy the script.
It’s not dishonesty. It’s diplomacy. And like most things in this life, it’s how we survive.
