Soon to be Marine wife looking for advice...?

[Critter]

Sounds like you two have solid relationship on which to build already. That is always a plus. And from the real answers on here you have some great advice already. One of the hardest things to take with the military is the schedule. As you're finding out right now, it's written in water. He could leave any time between now and March with December as a "planned" early date. If you can learn to deal with that you'll have won half the battle of the military dependent. The other half is how to deal with the emotional swings those changes in times and togetherness can bring. Don't be alarmed if you find yourselves arguing more often as his ship date approaches. It's common. It happened every time my husband shipped out for a Navy deployment. Knowing it was going to happen didn't stop it, knowing just made us faster to forgive and forget and get back on track to enjoying our time together.

My other advice is probably going to be contrary to what you'll hear from just about everyone else. When he gets to his duty station have him ask for FRG (Family Readiness Group) contact information. Even if you two haven't managed to get married yet. Some groups do allow girlfriends to participate if the service member okays it. Or search any social media site for family groups in your area. I've seen them of Facebook and Myspace and Yahoo groups and CafeMom as well as found them just through searching on Google. The groups have a reputation of being catty and cliquey and some are. But FRGs are there to give the spouses/families information on the military lifestyle in general and pass on information that is unit specific. Even in the worst one, the cattiest and cliquey-est, that I was a member of, there was always one person who was there to actually help. And in the best groups, I made more contacts than you can count. The good people were my support group through 20 years of DH's Navy career and are still friends I maintain contact with. And most of them were people I would have NEVER met any other way.