Families Under Stress

In surveys and qualitative studies, spouses of service members strongly endorse this view, describing their belief that the demands of military service, and deployments in particular, lead to divorce. The assumption behind such statements is that the stresses associated with lengthy deployments (e.g., financial difficulties, anxiety about loved ones in combat, challenges communicating) interfere with spouses' efforts to maintain their relationships, damaging marriages that would have remained satisfying and fulfilling in the absence of military stress. From this premise, it follows that divorce rates among military marriages should rise whenever the demands on the military increase. Throughout this monograph, we refer to this idea as the stress hypothesis. The overarching goal of this monograph is to inform discussions of the current needs of military families by evaluating the existing empirical support for the stress hypothesis. We pursue this goal in two ways. First, we review the prior research literature on military marriages, focusing on research that has attempted to explain how military marriages succeed and fail. Second, we examine data on transitions into and out of marriage assembled from service personnel records, estimating trends over the past ten years and the direct effects of deployment on subsequent risk of marital dissolution.