Divorce And The Military (Well-Researched and Updated)

Note: I originally wrote this and was made aware that I was comparing two completely different statistics, which skewed the numbers. So, while I’m still very upset that none of the articles provide a comparison – good or bad – with the general populace, I’ve decided to go in a different direction with this post. I have suffered through the actual Rand report on the military divorce rate and researched divorce statistics – to the extent available – of the rest of America.

First of all, congrats to VAMC for getting recognized in the NYTimes. Stay tuned to the You Served podcast as we are also planning to have Mr. Long on an upcoming show to discuss military finances at length. But, I digress…

As I was reading through my Huntsville Times newspaper this morning (it was a free subscription that I will NOT be renewing), an article popped off the page at me.

The divorce rate among soldiers and Marines increased last year as military marriages suffered continuing stress from America’s two ongoing wars. There were an estimated 10,200 failed marriages in the active duty Army and 3,077 among Marines, according to figures obtained by The Associated Press for the budget year ended Sept. 30.

That’s a divorce rate of 3.5 percent among more than 287,000 married troops in the Army, up from 3.3 percent in the previous fiscal year, according to Defense Department figures.

Any divorce is terrible and an increase to any demographic should be looked at as distressing. After all, marriage is a holy institution between a man and woman – yes, a MAN and WOMAN (these views are my own and do not reflect the views of YouServed.com or its parent company VAMortgageCenter.com). Marriage is something that requires work. Stress, money and other factors heavily play into the success or failure of marriage, but the biggest key to a long, happy, healthy marriage is selflessness, love, and devotion. People need to remember the reasons they got married to begin with and learn to work through each other’s weaknesses and failures.

First of all, the article claims that the dual wars and stresses placed on the military are to blame for the rise in divorces. In fact, the research report says “data from the past ten years of service personnel records provide little support for either of these predictions.” There’s no question that stress and deployment could be blamed for some divorces, but those very same issues could be blamed for keeping some marriages together. It’s no secret that a deployment will affect a marriage one way or another. However, it’s not always negative. In many instances, a deployment has actually strengthened a marriage. I happen to think it definitely strengthened mine and I’ve talked to other Soldiers with similar feelings.

Something else none of these articles talk about is the fact that current divorce rates have arrived at the levels they were at back in 1996 – when we weren’t at war!

One of the points of the article is that stress from long deployments plays a big role in the divorce rate in the military. In fact the report itself says the stress hypothesis is only accurate for active duty members of the Air Force. They’re not used to being away from a remote control or comfortable recliner for so many months at a time (those comments were strangely absent in the actual report). According to the report,

In that service, among enlisted members and officers, the more days that married service members spent deployed, the greater their risk of dissolving their marriages after they returned. In no other service could we observe the predicted effect of time deployed on risk of dissolution. On the contrary, for enlisted members in the active Army, Navy, and Marines, and for officers in the active Navy and Marines, the longer that a service member is deployed while married, the lower the subsequent risk of marital dissolution.

So, if the report said exactly that, why did the AP report that “long and repeated deployments required of many troops have been widely blamed for unprecedented stresses on military couples”? I mean, bloody hell, directly under the section titled “Understanding the Effects of Military Service and
Deployment on Military Marriages” we find this:

Despite the demonstrable stresses associated with military service and deployment and the widespread assumption that these stresses lead to the deterioration of military marriages, our analyses revealed little support for the stress hypothesis.

But, what bothers me the most is not what is IN the article, but what is missing from it: perspective. What perspective is missing from this article? How about the national divorce rate compared to the military divorce rate. Where is this in the article? Why wouldn’t they contrast the fact that the military is actually a pretty family-friendly place to be married? There is absolutely NO mention of the national statistics anywhere in the article. In all the reports I’ve read, the civilian divorce rate is actually very similar at 3.8%. Maybe it’s just as stressful to be at Wal-Mart as it is to be at war?!

The report does provide an out for people like me that question why there isn’t a comparison:

To help evaluate research on military marriages, researchers are often requested to compare results obtained with military samples to results obtained with comparable civilian samples. Fulfilling such requests is not straightforward, however, because there is no consensus among researchers about the dimensions on which military and civilian samples might be comparable. The best practices for conducting these comparisons are worthy of direct attention.

I have another question no one seems to asking. What is rate of divorce among the different lengths of marriage within the military? In other words, what is the divorce rate among Soldiers married more than ten years prior to combat and those married less than ten years (or something along those lines)? I would think that young blossoming relationships would be more strained under current conditions that established marriages. Or actually the other way around.

One of the findings of this study that may lend some possible answers is that military men tended to marry younger than their civilian counterparts and have children younger as well. Deployments also tend to hasten Soldiers into marriage to ensure that a boyfriend or girlfriend is taken care of in case of death, not thinking about the long-term prospects of being married to someone they may not have married otherwise. I’ve seen many Soldiers marry within weeks or months of dating someone simply because they were deploying. The relationship wasn’t necessarily a monogamous one to begin with and now the Soldier is away for a year to 15 months. None of this is discussed in the media either.

Instead, our beloved mainstream media wants you to think that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as all of our other commitments around the world, are causing Soldiers to get divorced. So what is the rest of America’s excuse? Perhaps we should force more people into the military and actually protect marriage!!

Don’t get me wrong – I know that the military is a stressful life and deployment DO play a role in some individuals getting a divorce. However, I’m also a realist who recognizes that the number of “Quick Divorces – $179!” signs outside the gates of Fort Stewart BEFORE the war. My issue is with the contempt for the military and any point the media can make in opposing the war. When it comes to reporting, I expect more unbiased FACTS!