The Posting Order That Changes Everything
You have just started to feel settled. You know the neighbours. You have found a coffee shop you like. Your children have friends at school. You have even started to build something that feels like a genuine social circle. And then the posting order arrives, and you know exactly what it means: in a few months, you will be starting all over again.
For military spouses and partners, this cycle is not a one-off upheaval — it is a way of life. The average military family moves every two to three years, and some postings are even shorter. Each move means new schools, new GPs, new routines, and the exhausting process of rebuilding a social network from scratch. Again.
Devon knows this reality intimately. The county is home to the Commando Training Centre Royal Marines at Lympstone, where on average 1,300 recruits and 400 potential officers attend training courses every year. A 2019 estimate put the number of veterans living in Devon at around 107,000. Military families are woven into the fabric of this county — and yet many of them feel invisible in their own communities.
The Social Cost of Service Life
The social challenges facing military families are well documented but rarely discussed outside of Forces circles. A study of female partners of serving personnel published in the Journal of Family Psychology in 2023 found that problems arising from service-related moves predicted greater psychological distress — even after accounting for the service member's PTSD symptoms and for deployment separation, which on its own did not. Relocation, in other words, is a stressor in its own right, not simply a side effect of deployment. (That study's sample was American; the closest UK work, described below, points the same way.)
One military spouse, quoted by the Armed Forces charity SSAFA, put it simply: "I have moved all over Europe in the last decade. It's sometimes hard to make friends and fit in especially if you don't have children."
That is a quiet sentence about a loud problem. Making friends is not a nicety on an accompanied posting — it is the difference between a place you live and a place you endure. And where the usual on-ramps to a community are missing, whether that is a school gate, a workplace, or simply time, the isolation can settle in fast.
Military families do not just move house — they move their entire social infrastructure. Each posting means losing proximity to friends, leaving support networks, and starting the process of trust-building with new neighbours, schools, and communities. Jeffrey Hall's study of 355 people moving into new social environments (Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 2019) estimated it takes roughly 50 hours of shared time to move from acquaintance to casual friend, about 90 to become a friend, and more than 200 before someone counts as a close friend. When you know you might move again in two years, the maths can feel impossible.
The Employment-Isolation Connection
One of the most significant but under-discussed factors in military spouse isolation is employment. When you move every two to three years, building a career becomes extraordinarily difficult. CV gaps, remote postings, childcare challenges, and employer perceptions about military family mobility all create barriers.
A King's College London and University of Liverpool study of UK military spouses (Gribble and colleagues, Health Psychology Open, 2019) found that accompanied postings limited spouses' agency over their employment decisions. But the same research revealed something important: employment gave spouses an independent identity, enabled social connectedness, and provided a sense of self-confidence and value. The authors suggest spouses who are able to work may be better placed to offset the social disruption of a posting by building new networks. Separate work by Lancaster University and the University of Manchester on the wives of British Army personnel reached a similar conclusion about the constraints a partner's service places on employment, amenities and leisure.
This has real implications for social life. Work gives you a ready-made social environment — colleagues, lunch conversations, after-work drinks. Without it, the entire burden of social connection falls on your own initiative, which is exhausting when you are simultaneously managing a household, supporting children through yet another school transition, and dealing with the emotional weight of a partner who may be deployed.
If you are navigating the overlap between work identity and friendship, our article on maintaining bonds beyond the workplace explores how professional relationships can become genuine friendships — something that matters enormously when your time in any one place is limited.
Why Standard Social Advice Falls Short
Most advice about making friends assumes stability. Join a club. Become a regular. Give relationships time to develop naturally. This is sound guidance for someone who has moved once and plans to stay. It is less useful for someone who knows they will be packing boxes again in eighteen months.
Military spouses need strategies that work faster and that account for the unique pressures of Service life. Here is what actually helps.
Embrace the Military Community — But Do Not Limit Yourself to It
The military community offers something rare: instant understanding. Other military spouses know exactly what your life is like. They understand the deployments, the uncertainty, the constant adjustment. There is enormous comfort in being with people who do not need an explanation.
But limiting your social circle exclusively to the military community has risks. If your entire network is made up of people who also move every few years, you may find yourself perpetually losing friends. A mixed network — some military, some civilian — gives you stability alongside solidarity.
The Gordon Messenger Centre at CTCRM Lympstone, for example, hosts events and activities for the Royal Marines family and wider community. It is an excellent starting point, but it should be a launchpad rather than a boundary.
Prioritise Structured Social Events
When you need to build connections quickly, unstructured socialising is inefficient. You need environments where introductions are facilitated, where conversation flows naturally, and where you do not need to be the one constantly initiating.
This is why structured social events — community dinners, supper clubs, activity groups, classes — are disproportionately valuable for military families. They compress the early stages of friendship by creating shared experiences in a low-pressure setting. You can meet more people in a single dinner event than in months of hoping to bump into someone at the school gates.
When you arrive at a new posting, book yourself into three social events in the first month. Not one. Three. The first might feel awkward. The second will feel easier. By the third, you will start to recognise faces and feel the beginnings of belonging. Speed matters when your timeline is short, and front-loading your social effort pays dividends.
Lower the Friendship Bar — Temporarily
This sounds counterintuitive, but hear me out. Most people wait to feel a strong connection before investing in a friendship. Military spouses do not have that luxury. When your window is two to three years, you need to be willing to invest in people before you are certain the friendship will stick.
This does not mean being indiscriminate. It means being open. Say yes to the coffee invitation even if you are not sure about the person yet. Accept the playdate offer even if small talk drains you. Go to the community event even if you would rather stay home. As we explore in our piece on working from home and feeling alone, the gap between wanting connection and actually pursuing it is where loneliness lives.
Build Portable Rituals
One of the most effective strategies military spouses develop is creating social rituals that can survive a move. A monthly dinner with friends — whether in the same town or over video call — becomes an anchor point. A tradition of hosting a welcome gathering whenever you arrive somewhere new establishes you as a connector from day one.
These rituals give you something to transplant. When you move, you do not start with nothing. You start with a template, a practice, a way of being social that you carry with you like a recipe you know by heart.
The Support Infrastructure You Should Know About
The UK has a substantial support network for military families, though many spouses report not knowing what is available. Here are the key organisations:
SSAFA (the Armed Forces charity) runs the Community Connection Champions programme, funded by the Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust, which recruits and trains volunteers — often from the military community themselves — to identify local needs and set up activities. Champions have run everything from hill walks and reading groups to wreath-making classes and dog-walking clubs, across serving communities from Birmingham to Brunei.
The HIVE Information Service provides information and support for the whole military community, including guidance on relocation, local area information, and signposting to social opportunities. When you arrive at a new posting, the HIVE should be one of your first calls.
Royal British Legion offers support for the Armed Forces community and their families, including advice on wellbeing and navigating life transitions.
Devon Forces Family provides locally-focused signposting for military families in the county, towards health services, community organisations and social opportunities. Some of its pages have not been refreshed for a while, so check anything time-sensitive directly.
Forces Connect South West helps military families across the region access covenant-related services and community resources.
The Armed Forces Covenant sets out the principle that those who serve, and their families, should face no disadvantage compared with other citizens in accessing public services. Since the Armed Forces Act 2021, specified public bodies have a legal duty to have due regard to that principle in housing, healthcare and education. If you feel you are being disadvantaged in one of those areas, that duty gives you grounds to raise it.
Maintaining Friendships After You Move
Perhaps the most bittersweet aspect of military spouse social life is the trail of friendships left behind at each posting. You meet wonderful people, build genuine closeness, and then one of you moves. The friendship is not over, but it changes fundamentally.
Maintaining friendships across distance requires the same intentionality that building them does. Our article on building a support network, not just a social circle discusses how to create connections that endure beyond proximity.
What military spouses often discover is that their friendships, forged quickly and under shared pressure, can be remarkably resilient. There is something about the military community's understanding of impermanence that makes people invest deeply in the time they have. Former posting friends who have not seen each other in years can pick up exactly where they left off — because the bond was real, even if the geography has changed.
Create a "friendship maintenance" system that works for you. This might be a calendar reminder to message three friends each week, a group chat for each posting you have lived through, or a tradition of sending postcards when you arrive somewhere new. The system matters less than the consistency. Small, regular gestures keep friendships alive across distance and time.
Your Children Are Watching
If you have children, your approach to social life during postings matters for them too. Children who watch their parents build and maintain friendships across moves learn that connection is portable, that new beginnings are manageable, and that relationships can survive change.
This does not mean pretending it is easy. It is perfectly healthy to let your children see that leaving friends is sad, that starting somewhere new is hard, and that it takes effort to build a social life. What matters is that they also see you doing it — showing up, trying, and gradually finding your people again.
Military children are often remarkably socially skilled precisely because they have had to be. But they also carry the cumulative weight of repeated goodbyes. Modelling healthy social habits, and creating family social rituals that travel with you, gives them a framework for managing their own social lives as they grow.
You Are Stronger Than You Think
Military spouses develop social skills that most people never need to acquire. You can walk into a room full of strangers and start a conversation. You can assess a community quickly and identify where the connections are. You can build meaningful friendships in months rather than years. You can say goodbye to people you love and keep the friendship alive across continents.
These are extraordinary abilities. They are born from difficulty, yes, but they are genuine strengths. The resilience you have built through years of upheaval is not just survival — it is a form of social mastery that few people ever develop.
The next time you are standing in an unfamiliar kitchen, wondering how you will do this all over again, remember: you have done it before. You will do it again. And somewhere in this new place, there are people who will become important to you — people who do not know yet that you are about to walk into their lives and change them for the better.
Devon is full of those people. Some of them are military families too, carrying the same invisible weight you carry. Some of them are civilians who would love to meet you but do not know how to bridge the gap. All of them are waiting for someone to show up and say, "I am new here. Shall we have dinner?"