I stood there in my eye popping orange lifeguard uniform and watched him drive away. It felt like he had just driven off a cliff, not driven to the airport to leave for Army basic training. I tried to clean my tear streaked face up and for the time being, it worked but those would not be the last tears I shed over his departure. Two days after he left for basic, I left for college. I was 18 years old, in a new place and feeling horribly alone.

For nearly two weeks I cried myself to sleep. I had no idea what to expect when he left. All I knew was that we had dated for 4 years before he left and we would overcome anything that the military threw at us. It frustrated me so to have people all around me telling me to "dump" him if I was so upset. Though I was new to being a military girlfriend, I knew that only another woman in the same situation would understand. So, since knowledge is the greatest weapon, I began my search for information.

I went to military chatrooms, I looked on the army website and I was directed to sites for military spouses. I first found comfort at a site called SpouseNet. They welcomed me in even though I was "just" a girlfriend. Most of them remembered when they were girlfriends and tried to help me out as best they could. To this day I thank them for that.

The women of SpouseNet helped me to realize that it did no good to linger over what I didn't have at the time. It was a simple solution but it is often the simple solutions that are overlooked. I looked at the situation like duty. He was doing his duty to his country now I have to do my duty to myself. I had to live my life for ME. I continued to hang around at SpouseNet but I began to realize that military girlfriends had different things in common than the military spouses.

Most of us don't have children, most of us don't live with our boyfriends, let alone see them often. I searched for weeks for websites created for women who were dating men in the military and found none. I wanted to find a site that catered to the sort of situations we girlfriends dealt with. When I didn't find one I did what any other bored college student with a fast internet connection would and I created my own site.

It started out as three paragraphs on Xoom.com, essentially the same three paragraphs that begin the home page today. Due to lack of time and lack of web authoring experience, that's how it stayed for several months. I started to meet one or two other girlfriends on SpouseNet so I started an email list. It was a group of names on a common list managed my Outlook Express on my hard drive until someone suggested OneList (now eGroups) to me. I moved it there and membership took off.

After 25 or so women had joined the email list I decided to do some work on the site. I made some simple graphics in Photoshop, added some links and made an email account for it and the Military Girlfriends site was born! Over time, as my knowledge of HTML and the internet grew, so did the site. The hits increased and so did the demand for information, and so the site grew.

Eventually, I moved it to Freeservers in an attempt to make the URL a little easier to remember. I started doing some major advertising, talking it up in chatrooms and submitting it to search engines. It also spread like wildfire by word of mouth. The email list grew and things just kept getting bigger. With the aid of my techie younger brother I've made the site the way it is today.

I never dreamed that anything of this magnitude would come of my ramblings and home-made email list. The many letters of thanks I have receieved have more than paid for the effort I have put into my site. I have found happiness and stability in my long-distance military relationship and I hope to help others in my situation attain that same feeling of security.