firstwivesworld - Marriage: A Casualty of War - Comments

"He too had an affair, but

Cathy Meyer — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:16:14 -0400

"He too had an affair, but it was with a fellow officer." I hope you are continuing to do well.

Once again, I'm sorry...

Cathy Meyer — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 13:05:11 -0400

Military members deserting their families happens in all branches of the military. What I find unacceptable is the military's response to what is happening to these marriages. I don't have to imagine the pain you and your children suffered because my children and I have been through it also. It is indescribable. I hope that you are doing well and that you have been able to move on with your life. If anyone reading my articles would like to communicate one on one please feel free to email me at [email protected]">[email protected].

The same situation happened to my family

Guest — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 10:59:08 -0400

The almost same exact situation happened to me and my children (ages 4 and 1.) My now ex came home from his Naval deployment and was no longer the same man. He too had an affair, but it was with a fellow officer. The emotional pain my children and I went through is indescribable. I am so sorry to hear that situations such as these happen more often than is reported.

Sorry...

Cathy Meyer — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:49:48 -0400

I'm very sorry about what you have gone through. I think a lot of military spouses find that, when all is said and done the military has little concern for families and strenghtening them. There is a code of conduct but they have no sense of responsibility when holding their members to that code of conduct. How can people like your husband be expected to hold himself responsible when the organization he belongs to feels they are not culpable for the behavior of their members? There is a lot of talk about family focused programs and how much is being done to help troubled marriages. I find it funny though that when a marriage falls a part...when the shit hits the fan and all hell breaks lose military personnel with any authority look the other way. In my opinion there is a lot of talk but very little action when it comes to exactly how much effort the military puts toward helping families in crisis.

The Army is not family

Guest — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 13:42:03 -0400

The Army is not family focused as they state they are, they would prefer soldiers not being married. They also turn their eyes away from affairs, although they say its unacceptable and they will punish those having affairs. My ex-husband gave my HPV and I told my doctor, a Navy Colonial, that I had only been with my husband and he just looked the other way, he stated he probably contacted it from a toliet seat. If anyone know about HPV, you know you get it from being intimate. So instead of reporting my husband, he chose to ignore it. Just like the rest of the military

Marriage: A Casualty of War

Cathy Meyer — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 10:24:48 -0400

This time last summer Sharon, who asked that her last name not be used, was the typical wife of an Army pilot deployed to Iraq. She was expending a lot of energy on just surviving. But like most military spouses, she supported her husband in what he had chosen to do, and for what he believed in.

Her husband’s deployment meant she was wearing two hats, both mother and father to two children, 6 and 10. She mowed the lawn, kept the house, paid the bills, and laid awake at night worrying about her husband’s safety.

But she didn’t mind the extra work.

“It was all doable because there was relief in the friendships with other women who were experiencing the same in their day-to-day lives,” she said. “We vented to each other and took care of each other. We weren’t isolated because we were there for each other.”

Sharon, 36, is once again struggling to survive, but this summer for very different reasons. She is separated from a husband she says “came back from Iraq a changed man.”

As she sits in my living room, looking anxious and worn, Sharon tries to explain what went wrong in her marriage.

“I struggle to understand what happened and make sense of it,” she says. “All I know is that once he came home he was there physically, but emotionally he was absent.”

Shortly after returning from Iraq, her husband took up with another woman. It was a relationship, he told Sharon, that didn’t demand that he deal with parenting and a wife who wanted him to share wartime experiences.

The reunion of couples after long deployments and the post-deployment processes are complex and poorly understood. So complex that many military marriages are not surviving the transition.

In a military mental health survey done in Iraq in 2006, 20 percent of soldiers interviewed (both men and women) said they or their spouses were planning a divorce; that is up 5 percent from a year earlier.