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While the media continues to dole out news stories about military marriages falling apart as a result of repeated deployment of soldiers to Iraq and Afghanistan, a new study found that the rate of divorce among military families hasn’t increased in more than a decade.
In fact, the year-long study, conducted by the Rand Corp., indicates that war zone deployments can actually make a marriage stronger by providing families extra money—in the form of tax breaks and combat pay—and gives the overseas spouse some job satisfaction.
Study Findings
According to the study, three percent of marriages with male enlisted recruits and 1.4 percent with male officers resulted in a divorce in 1996. Four years later, those numbers slightly lowered to 2.7 percent and 1.2 percent. By 2005, the figures reached 2.8 and 1.5 percent, concluding that there was no significant rise in military divorces in the last decade.
While some experts believe that the study conclusions may be a reflection of the growing success of military family support programs, they agree that more research needs to be conducted to provide more than just a “snapshot” of military marriages.
“It’s a double-edged thing: Each deployment piles stress upon stress. But at the same time you’re learning coping skills,” said Kristin Henderson, wife of a Navy chaplain and author of “While They’re at War: The True Story of American Families on the Homefront.”
Conventional Beliefs Disproved
The study didn’t find a significant difference between the divorce rates of Marine Corps and Army personnel who have been deployed and those who haven’t. Some numbers actually revealed that the longer the deployment, the less likely the marriage will end in comparison to non-deployed troops.
“The conventional wisdom about how deployments affect military marriages turns out to be wrong,” the study concluded. “Although some may find these results counterintuitive, in fact, they are consistent with other recent findings.”
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