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Female airmen, caregivers split up the most

Forget everything you thought you knew about marriage and divorce in the Air Force. Most of it isn’t true.

Airmen in career fields with the highest deployment tempos don’t get divorced more than those who spend most of their time at home station. Fighter jocks, supposed playboys, actually get divorced less than the force as a whole. And those whose job is to care for others — nurses, social workers, family support center staff and educators — have the hardest time staying married.

As of August, 70.9 percent of officers and 56.3 percent of enlisted were married, and 4.4 percent of active-duty officers and 7.3 percent of enlisted airmen were divorced.

Among adults in the general population, 50.5 percent were married and 10.5 percent were divorced as of 2007, the latest year for which data is available from the U.S. Census Bureau.

An analysis by Air Force Times of the service’s marriage and divorce statistics turned up surprising conclusions. Many defy easy explanation.

* Female airmen are two to three times more likely than male airmen to be divorced and are less likely to be married. Among active-duty officers, 3.1 percent of men and 10 percent of women are divorced. For enlisted, the numbers are 5.8 percent of men and 13.1 percent of women.

* Officer career fields with both the highest and lowest percentages of divorce are tied to health care. Physicians generally are the least likely to be divorced, and nurses, physician assistants and health care administrators the most likely. Operating room nurses have the highest percentage of divorce, 15.6 percent.

* Some enlisted career fields with the lowest divorce percentages are those most heavily deployed — pararescue; survival, evasion, resistance and escape; tactical air control party; and security forces. Those with the highest percentages include the fields of education and training, paralegal, personnel, family support center and military training instructor.

The reasons for divorce among airmen are myriad, said Chaplain (Maj.) David Carr, the marriage and family coordinator in the resource division of the Chaplain Corps College, co-located with the Army Chaplain School at Fort Jackson, S.C. But a major factor, he said, is a misunderstanding of what marriage should be and how much work it involves.

“A lot of folks just have this feeling that love should be a natural thing,” Carr said, “and when the love stops then the marriage must end, rather than thinking ... love is going to be up and down and ... it needs to be maintained.”

Deployed, but not divorced

Deployments do not lead to divorces, statistics show. Today’s divorce percentages are just slightly higher than the 4.3 percent of officers and 6.9 percent of enlisted airmen who were divorced as of September 2001, before the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began.

Among the 10 officer and 10 enlisted career fields with the highest divorce percentages, only two — flight nurse, at 13.8 percent divorced, and physician assistant, at 9.6 percent — were among the Air Force’s 100 most heavily deployed career fields in 2008. But six of the 20 career fields with the lowest divorce percentages — pararescuemen, Tactical Air Control Party, security forces, developmental engineer, bomber pilot and mobility pilot — were among the 100 most deployed.

The numbers counter the experiences of the airmen interviewed for this story, who all cited deployments as the most significant challenge to their marriages.

One is an airman who works with the Army to coordinate air and ground efforts. Now in Afghanistan, the TACP operator — he asked to remain anonymous to speak frankly about his divorce — was married for more than four years before things fell apart earlier this year.

Deployments “were definitely 80 percent of the problem,” he wrote in an e-mail. “When you’re deployed it is hard to communicate. ... And sometimes when you do get to communicate you just don’t get the feeling that the other person cares.”

Even when he returned from deployments, the TACP operator said, the time away from home and his war experiences affected the marriage.

“Getting back from a deployment was like being a newlywed again, for a few weeks,” he said. “Then it is hard to adjust again [and] I noticed some problems that most would now associate with PTSD [post-traumatic stress disorder], such as getting angry at ... something as simple as the dishes or cleaning around the house.”

The deployments, the TACP operator said, placed a strain on an essential part of marriage: trust. He sometimes heard about his wife being at a party and became jealous simply because she was around other men.

A lack of trust has been a problem that Master Sgt. Mark Wilson has seen in other marriages during his seven deployments. Wilson, the plans and programs superintendent for the 96th Security Forces Squadron at Eglin Air Force Base, Fla., described himself as happily married for 22 years.

“I’ve seen several marriages fail [because of it],” he said. “In fact, I’ve seen attempted suicides over jealousy or somebody thinking that their husband or their wife is cheating on them while they’re away. It’s mainly because of the unknown.”

Deployments are difficult for Wilson because he has to miss birthdays and anniversaries and because they are a burden on his wife, a physical education assistant at Eglin Elementary School.

“It’s very difficult any time anybody’s separated,” he said. “Stress is enhanced quite a bit because obviously the [spouse] is taking on all the [family] roles and you sort of step out of those roles for six months at a time. ... That help isn’t there.”

Despite the statistics, deployments — especially repeated deployments — are the biggest contributor to the divorces that Carr, the chaplain, sees.

“There’s no question that extensive deployments make ... [relationship] health harder and harder,” he said. “We try to teach skills about how you can keep love alive though you’re separated ... how to keep good communication flowing.”

Women are the only group in the Air Force that has a higher divorce percentage than in the rest of the U.S.

Of the active-duty force, 66.6 percent of men and 63.2 percent of women have been or are married, and 5.3 percent of men and 12.5 percent of women are divorced.

Among the general population, 9.2 percent of men and 11.6 percent of women were divorced as of 2007, again the latest data available from the Census Bureau.

Carr has noticed a gender gap in his counseling of airmen with marriage problems. He thinks the difference needs to be studied more but believes married women in the military face particular challenges that married men don’t.

Most significantly, Carr said, women still shoulder much of the burden of raising children and running households.

“Women are much more involved [in the military mission] than they’ve ever been before, and their [home] responsibilities that they have historically had have continued,” Carr said. “It just seems to be exponentially harder on ladies.”

Another factor, said Kathy Moakler of the National Military Family Association, is that civilian men married to women in the military often have a hard time finding support, which can put additional stress on marriages.

“It takes a lot of courage to walk into a [support meeting] where you may be the only guy there,” said Moakler, the association’s government relations director. “It can be very difficult to find the kind of support you’re looking for unless you are comfortable joining the family readiness group with a bunch of women. There’s a sense of isolation that follows these non-military husbands.”

Dovetailing with the gender gap is the fact that the female-dominated field of nursing has the highest divorce percentage — 11.7 — of any officer category in the Air Force. Eighty percent have been or are married.

More than 70 percent of Air Force nurses are women, by far the most of any career category. Both the gender breakdown in the career field and the stress of the work — long hours plus dealing with life-and-death issues — could explain the high divorce percentage among nurses.

Air Force doctors — more than 70 percent of whom are men — face similar work circumstances as nurses, but only 3.3 percent are divorced. About 83 percent have been or are married.

Other career fields that involve caring for people — social worker, physician assistant, force support, family support center and enlisted physical medicine — have among the highest divorce percentages in the Air Force, and they all have a higher than average percentage of women.

Many support resources are available for airmen in troubled marriages or those who want to keep their healthy marriages strong, Carr said.

Chaplains on base are available to provide confidential counseling, and the Chaplain Corps started sponsoring marriage wellness retreats at some bases last year.

Called Marriage Care, the retreats are free or low-cost to encourage military couples to participate. About 20 couples participate in the weekend-long sessions. Only a limited number of bases have the retreats, Carr said, but the Chaplain Corps plans to expand the program.

The retreats are based on a successful Army program called Strong Bonds.

“It’s designed primarily to help recently redeployed airmen reconnect with their spouses and to prevent marital difficulties and certainly to prevent divorce,” Carr said. “We’ve been able to touch 226 marriages with those 12 events, and according to the feedback [we’ve] saved dozens of marriages.”

Airmen interested in marriage retreats should contact their base chaplain’s office, he said.

Social workers and counselors are also available on base, at Airman and Family Readiness Centers and through base mental health offices.

For airmen who prefer to go off base for counseling, the Military OneSource program allows service members and dependents to attend up to 12 sessions with a professional in the community for free.

The newest program is the Defense Department’s Military Family Life Consultants initiative, which hires qualified counselors as contractors to provide support for service members. The program launched in 2004 but has recently been expanded to serve more installations and airmen.

The counselors are all licensed clinicians with master’s degrees and at least five years’ experience in social work or counseling. They receive special training so they can understand military-specific issues such as deployment cycles and military culture.

Under the program, airmen can have six free, confidential counseling sessions. Along with marriage counseling, the counselors can provide help with other family issues, stress and anxiety, depression, grief and loss, anger management and parent and child communication. Even when counseling fails and a marriage ends in divorce, Carr said, airmen can still seek help.

“When divorce does occur, chaplains still provide counseling,” he said. “These are people who are hurting.”