# Are You A Military Couple?



## Administrator (May 8, 2013)

Being a military couple comes with its own unique challenges and sacrifices. You may have to go days, weeks, or months without seeing each other and/or be separated from your closest friends and family. You may also find it hard to stay emotionally connected with each other. Additionally, when one of you returns from deployment, re-integration back into your day-to-day life and routine can be challenging and can be made more difficult by the onset of mental health issues that arose from service.

These issues often create the following cycles:
*
Day-to-Day Problems*

If only one of you is in the military or if you are in two different positions within the military, you may feel hurt when your partner cannot talk about all aspects of his/her job or feel alone when your partner needs to work long hours. If you are the only member of the couple in the military, you may feel guilty that your work takes you away from your family or upset that your partner does not understand the sacrifices you make.

To read the rest of the tips, click here:


----------



## Vinnydee (Jan 4, 2016)

I served in Vietnam in the Army. The minimum tour of duty was 1 year. If you were married you got two weeks of R&R to meet up with your wife in Hawaii. I was engaged so I could not see my fiancee and as a result she cheated on me. What saddened me though was the number of military wives who cheated on their deployed husbands. I never did anything with them having been cheated on myself. My roommate used to date them. He told me that normally unattractive or just normal looking wives were able to attract men that normally would not be attracted to them. That and at least 6 months of loneliness and waiting for the knock on the door to tell you that your husband is dead, made them do things that they would not otherwise do. They were surrounded by horny men who had not had sex with a woman for a year and it was like a candy store for some.

I hope that it is different now. As someone who got a Dear John letter in combat, it really broke my heart to see what was going on. My ex fiancee called me 47 years later to apologize. She said she was immature at 18 and could not take the worrying about me after seeing the news every night showing dead american soldiers. A friend lent her a supporting hand and then lent her something else apparently. 

It has to be very difficult and I applaud all military couples who are able to hold it together. No one can know the stress of being in a life and death situation every day. They think they know, but unless they have experienced it for themselves, they do not have a clue what it does to a person. I came home from Nam, got married and started to attack my wife at night. One morning she woke me up holding a pillow over her face in case I attacked her and it broke my heart. Just thinking about it now brings tears to my eyes. She loved me so much that she endured a few years of PTSD as they call it now. Back then we were just told to deal with it. One day I am in Nam dodging bullets and rockets and two days later I am in the States arriving by a commercial jet and being spit on by anyone getting close to me. 

Sorry to digress but I never told anyone this before. You may find the following excerpt of interest as I did when I was investigating the problems of wives of military men. I was just curious if what happened in my time was still going on. I know that the military was concerned about it and perhaps that is why combat tours are shorter.

According to Terry Gould's The Lifestyle: a look at the erotic rites of swingers, swinging began among American Air Force pilots and their wives during World War II before pilots left for overseas duty. The mortality rate of pilots was so high, as Gould reports, that a close bond arose between pilot families that implied that pilot husbands would care for all the wives as their own – emotionally and sexually – if the husbands were lost. Though the origins of swinging are contested, it is assumed American swinging was practiced in some American military communities in the 1950s. By the time the Korean War ended, swinging had spread from the military to the suburbs. The media dubbed the phenomenon wife-swapping.


----------

