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8 years of war take toll on military marriages

After more than eight years of war, some 200,000 military marriages have crashed and burned — more than 27,000 last year alone.

If troops got a Purple Heart for every broken heart, those who have suffered through a divorce since Sept. 11, 2001, would eclipse those with physical wounds by about 5 to 1.

Married troops are bickering more, loving less and deciding in ever-increasing numbers that they are better off without their better half, according to the latest surveys.

Officials say it’s hard to estimate exactly how much the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are to blame, but the trends are disturbing.

“There is no doubt that prolonged and multiple combat tours have put great pressure on the force,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told Congress in July. “We are monitoring the situation and paying close attention to telling statistics like suicide and divorce rates.”

Those statistics are troubling. A Military Times review of divorce data from 2001 to 2009 reveals:

• Active-duty divorce rates are up more than one-third across the Defense Department, climbing steadily from 2.6 percent of military marriages failing the year before the U.S. went to war to 3.6 percent in 2009.

• The Army shoulders the majority of that increase, with 63.6 percent more soldiers getting divorced in 2009 than in 2001. The Air Force is up 38 percent, the Navy 17.2 percent. The Marine Corps saw the smallest increase at 12.5 percent.

• Enlisted marriages are breaking up at more than twice the rate of officer marriages, at 4 percent and 1.8 percent, respectively. That’s a 43 percent increase in enlisted divorces since 2001. Officer divorces spiked in 2003-04 but otherwise have stayed relatively stable between 1.6 percent and 1.9 percent.

• Military women are divorcing more than twice as often as men, and the gap is widening. Last year, about 7 percent of married military women filed for divorce, compared with about 3 percent of men.

In the trenches

Nationwide, it is estimated that more than half of all marriages among those born after 1971 will fall apart, with one of every 10 collapsing within the first five years. Just how the military stacks up is unclear; the Defense Department compiles its divorce statistics in a way that makes direct comparisons difficult.

But one thing is clear: Marital survival doesn’t get any easier in the military.

Lisa Konen-Park, a marriage and family therapist at Fort Hood, Texas, has seen it all when it comes to problems between soldiers and spouses.

While every situation is different, there are common themes, she says. Most problems involve bad communication skills, deployments or combat-related stress and injuries — or a combination of all three.

“They don’t know how to talk to one another and solve conflict in a healthy manner,” she says. “A lot of the soldiers we’re seeing married quickly before deployment and now [the couples are] just getting to know each other.”

Roughly 60 percent of the couples she works with are enlisted, have been married for less than three years, are 26 years old or younger, and typically have one child and at least one deployment under their belt.

“Being at war changes a person,” she said. “When that person comes home, there are a lot of things they can’t or don’t want to share. That distance can wreak havoc on a marriage.”

Infidelity, domestic violence and drug or alcohol addictions are not uncommon, and only add to the stress.

“What these couples are going through right now has never happened before — it’s unprecedented in terms of going back and forth to war,” said Dr. Scott Stanley, director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver, who has been studying military families for 30 years.

“Repeated, chronic exposure to high danger and combat is definitely making it much harder for couples to make it,” he said.

By March, American troops will have been in sustained combat as long as both world wars and the Korean conflict combined.

About one in three troops say fights with their spouses have gotten worse since returning from downrange. Since 2005, service members who broke it off with their spouses or significant others within a year of deployment jumped from 14.4 percent to nearly 20 percent, according to the Defense Department’s most recent survey of health-related behaviors, released late last year.

Numbers like that have top leaders worried. In an update of his guidance to senior commanders in December, Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen specifically ordered the services to do a better job of monitoring divorce trends and how the wars are affecting families.

Strengthening marriages?

While war may be hell, its fire can become a refining crucible for some military marriages rather than a force of destruction, some experts say.

A 2007 Rand Corp. study had surprising conclusions indicating that married service members who had been deployed were less likely to end their marriages than those who had not been deployed. In fact, the study’s authors found that longer deployments could reduce the chance of divorce.

But studies done since then are calling those findings into question.

The Army’s latest annual survey of troops in Iraq found that married troops in combat units who said they intended to get divorced had nearly doubled from 12 percent in 2003 to 22 percent in 2009.

Thirty percent of junior enlisted troops deployed for 15 months said their marriages were over.

“One of the things we worry about with combat stress and more — and more frequent — deployments is that it’s becoming difficult to drop your pack,” says Navy Chaplain (Lt. Cmdr.) Kay Reeb.

“Of necessity, you distance yourself from your spouse and family when getting ready to deploy,” she says. “You get compartmentalized and focused on the mission.”

If the next deployment already is looming on the horizon when you get home from the last one, “it’s tempting sometimes to not bother shifting back,” she says.

“It’s easier, but it takes a toll on the marriage.”

Related reading

• Rules of engagement: How to marry a gem

• Potential red flags

More on military divorces

• Divorces edge up again in 9th year of war