Do Benefits Keep Military Couples Married?
Military.com
Amy Bushatz
November 2, 2011
Ten years of war and extreme stress on servicemembers and their families haven't made the military's divorce rate any higher than that of civilians, according to a new report. And the likely reason, the lead researcher says, is the pay and benefits the military offers to married couples.
"Our speculation is that civilians don't get paid extra if they're married, but [servicemembers do]," Benjamin Karney, the study's lead researcher, told Military.com. "The fact that the military pays people to stay married [likely] keeps them married. There's really something going on there, it seems."
The perks of marriage in the military don't stop at the extra pay and housing allowance, Karney noted. Among other benefits, military families also receive subsidized childcare, free counseling and marriage support, free or greatly reduced healthcare, and employment help for spouses.
Karney said the findings could be seen as a lesson for civilian society. If the military can make marriage work over years of war-related stress, he said, the rest of American culture should be able to follow suit.
"We know that the military is under stress and the stress is pretty bad -- but there are other things that matter, too ... which is the support that people have available to them," he said. "The lesson here is that when you help people out and make their lives better, they have better marriages."
The new study, performed by the RAND Corp., is the first of its kind. Unlike previous studies, it compared DoD personnel information from 1998 to 2005 with population data from the Census Bureau. The study broke out and examined divorce rates among male servicemembers and civilians based on race, age and pay to assess how divorce affects different populations within the military.
The results almost universally showed a higher rate of marriage in the military versus civilians, but the same or slightly lower rates of divorce among all military populations.
In 2010, the overall military divorce rate hovered at about 3.6 percent. A comparable civilian rate is not available because of the way that data is tracked year over year.
Military benefits may not be the only thing keeping military couples married, said Army chaplain Col. John Read, who is in charge of Soldier and family ministry for the service. In his view, military couples stay married despite stress because servicemembers are taught to be resilient.
"Suffice it to say that most of the stress that we go through would take an average civilian to the breaking point," he said. "The military is a different society, a different subset of society. It's not that we're any better, but there are some unique stressors that are probably growing our resilience."
However, because no broad study has been done on how happy servicemembers are in their marriages, it's impossible to tell what role resiliency plays in military marriage, Karney said. Instead of leaning on resiliency, he said, military couples could be simply waiting to leave the service and the benefits it offers before getting divorced.
"A really good question is: Do divorce rates of former military members go up after they leave the military?" he said. "And you would really, strongly expect that they would because all of these barriers to divorce are suddenly taken away."
No government agency tracks divorce rates among former servicemembers and veterans.
Source: http://www.military.com/news/article/do-benefits-keep-military-couples-married.html?ESRC=eb.nl