Study: Military marriages resilient

Despite enormous stress on military families from repeated wartime deployments and long periods living apart, service marriages are showing a level of resilience that social scientists can't yet explain.

Military divorce rates have climbed only gradually in recent years and, according to a report in the Journal of Family Issues this month, have not exceeded the rate of broken marriages reported among civilian peers.

Competitive wartime pay, extra allowances for being married in service and family support programs could be factors. Another might be the respect service people hold toward institutions in general, including marriage.

An exception to surprisingly positive data on military marriage remains divorce rates among female service members. Though excluded from closer scrutiny in the new report, marriages of women troops continue to dissolve at rates double that of military men, and at a significantly higher pace than reported for female civilians of similar age and educational background.

A total of 29,456 service members got divorced in fiscal 2011, a dissolution rate of 3.7 percent. That was slightly higher than 3.6 percent in 2010, continuing a gradual rise from 3.1 percent reported in 2005.

In 2000, however, a year before U.S. troops invaded Afghanistan and three years before the invasion of Iraq, the military's overall divorce rate was 3.7 percent, which matches last year's divorce rate after a decade of war.

The scholars who co-authored the Journal article — Benjamin R. Karney, David S. Loughran and Michael S. Pollard — argue that these annual divorce statistics can't be used to judge the "vulnerability" of military marriages, in peace or prolonged war, unless benchmarked against divorce rates for employed civilians of comparable age, race and education level.

Their study does that, and "the results speak to the resilience of military marriages," the report concludes. "Despite the demands of military service and the threat of long separations, service members are nevertheless more likely to be married than matched civilians." More significantly, though military divorce rates have been rising, the report finds, "service members are still no more likely to be divorced than comparable civilians."

To make their comparisons, the authors studied marriage and divorce data for male service members for years 1998 through 2005 — a four-year stretch before the recent era of conflict began, and another four after the onset of war in Afghanistan and, by 2003, in Iraq.

For data on civilian marriage and divorce, they relied on statistics for identical years from the Current Population Survey (CPS) of U.S. households, which the Bureau of Census conducts for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Past studies of divorce rates show that marriages are more likely to fail when couples marry young or when couples hail from segments of the population "relatively disadvantaged" which would mean non-white (blacks and Hispanics) or lower income couples, enlisted versus officer for example.

What research to date hasn't shown is how differences in divorce patterns between military and civilian might have changed during recent conflicts, influenced positively by factors such as extra deployment pay or negatively by the added stress of long and frequent wartime deployments.

Data comparisons in this report confirm that service members are far more likely than civilians to be married, and this difference holds true across age ranges, racial groups and in both pre-war and wartime periods.

Tom Philpott can be contacted at Military Update, P.O. Box 231111, Centreville, Va. 20120-1111, or by e-mail at:

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