Green Berets, Rangers and Navy Seals spend an average of nine months a year away from their families, and they are more likely to suffer long-term emotional damage from years of war.
I was a career intelligence employee. We were on the operational side so we deployed occasionally. Nothing like special operations who basically live overseas but I did three tours in my 20-year career before I had to retire for medical reasons. What I was hired I was told the average amount of ex-wives is three and to try to manage my home life well. I was in a very happy marriage at the time. Anyways, I’m working on wife number three right now. My mental health is shit. So predictable. But I’m a great stay at home dad so I’ve got that working for me. 🤪
Just to flip the perspective a bit on the whole military divorce rate thing: There’s also a huge incentive to get married in the first place. Getting married gets you Basic Allowance for Housing which is a monthly stipend for the average cost of living in your zip code. This is a couple thousand bucks a month just for getting a marriage certificate.
You also get to bring your spouse with you to other duty stations when you inevitably have to move.
Unscientific, but I think I remember reading somewhere that ~8 years was about the amount of time many people were able to deal with a shitty situation before they were psychologically done with it. I would also think after more and more time there is more sense of sunk cost and more to lose or fear of the unknown.
Not surprising about the Seals, or military members in general. The ones I saw that were most successful didn’t get married until they were already in for a while, and usually one of them was a veteran.
The term “7 year itch” comes to mind and I was told it resets after you have a kid.
Looking into where the blog got the results for the navy seals data, it appears to link back to a law firm specializing in divorces, and it’s not very clear where that firm even got the data, as it is summarized without a lot of citations. If anyone can track down where the original study data is, sharing would be really great to confirm what they are saying.
Looking at the summary they provided though, seems even among other service members, navy seals were an outlier (with rates reported around 4% or less across the branches for active duty personnel). Did they look into what lead to that disparity? Maybe it’s the type of assignments, or maybe something is being selected in the candidates?
