Mental Health Awareness Week: "Loneliness - a partner's perspective"

You can be surrounded by people and still feel lonely. When my partner joined a boat in Scotland, we decided I’d stay in our house, closer to my work and everyone we know, rather than move 500 miles away.

I am lucky to have incredible friends and family around me and our children while my partner is away. People who have dropped everything and turned up with a pasta bake, helped fix a broken boiler or sat with me and our poorly toddler in A&E at 3am. But sometimes the nature of a Submariner’s job means information has to be limited, i know very little, and there’s even less that I can share with anyone else.

While my partner is on land, we still struggle to speak on the phone - Submariners hours are long even when they’re not under the sea. I selectively filter our conversations anyway, knowing that he misses us and the guilt he feels when we’re having a tough week, or an excellent week, and he’s not here.

We’re never sure exactly when he’s leaving for sea, so we have multiple emotional goodbyes on the phone. Inevitably, he leaves after a 5 minute conversation about some trivial local gossip where I forget to tell him to be safe. I will obsess over the last call for months.

When he’s at sea we can go 6 months without seeing each other, with the last 6-8 seemingly endless weeks in limbo while I wait for a letter to tell me he’s 48 hours away from coming back.

I am very aware that in these moments I am a terrible friend. I lack patience, perspective and the ability to focus in a conversation. I become superstitious, and tired, and irritable. People give well meaning advice that just makes me less patient and more irritable and so I sulk and isolate myself further.

At times it felt like there was an air gap between me and everyone else, including my partner, for months at a time. I have a thousand things I want to know and no one can tell me; because they’re not here, or they don’t understand, or they’re not allowed to tell me. So I salute magpies and read the news obsessively and hope for some divine signal that the boat is safe and on their way home imminently.

Being part of the HMS Oardacious community has introduced me to friends who have been in my shoes, who are still in my shoes. I’ve realised that most of the time I just need someone to acknowledge things are hard, that it’s ok to have moments of feeling lost, and that magpies are not a reliable indicator of my future.

Campaigning for Oardacious has helped my whole family talk more about our mental health, and we’ve developed a language to talk about how we’re feeling. We’re infinitely better at supporting each other when we’re together, and have built resilience ready for when we’re apart again.

AnonymousMay 11, 2022