Military Divorce
Female airmen, caregivers split up the most
By Erik Holmes - Staff writer
Posted at http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2009/09/airforce_divorce_091909w/
Sunday Sep 20, 2009 9:20:35 EDT
Forget everything you thought you knew about marriage and divorce in the Air Force. Most of it isn’t true.
Airmen in career fields with the highest deployment tempos don’t get divorced more than those who spend most of their time at home station. Fighter jocks, supposed playboys, actually get divorced less than the force as a whole. And those whose job is to care for others — nurses, social workers, family support center staff and educators — have the hardest time staying married.
As of August, 70.9 percent of officers and 56.3 percent of enlisted were married, and 4.4 percent of active-duty officers and 7.3 percent of enlisted airmen were divorced.
Among adults in the general population, 50.5 percent were married and 10.5 percent were divorced as of 2007, the latest year for which data is available from the U.S. Census Bureau.
An analysis by Air Force Times of the service’s marriage and divorce statistics turned up surprising conclusions. Many defy easy explanation.
* Female airmen are two to three times more likely than male airmen to be divorced and are less likely to be married. Among active-duty officers, 3.1 percent of men and 10 percent of women are divorced. For enlisted, the numbers are 5.8 percent of men and 13.1 percent of women.
* Officer career fields with both the highest and lowest percentages of divorce are tied to health care. Physicians generally are the least likely to be divorced, and nurses, physician assistants and health care administrators the most likely. Operating room nurses have the highest percentage of divorce, 15.6 percent.
* Some enlisted career fields with the lowest divorce percentages are those most heavily deployed — pararescue; survival, evasion, resistance and escape; tactical air control party; and security forces. Those with the highest percentages include the fields of education and training, paralegal, personnel, family support center and military training instructor.
The reasons for divorce among airmen are myriad, said Chaplain (Maj.) David Carr, the marriage and family coordinator in the resource division of the Chaplain Corps College, co-located with the Army Chaplain School at Fort Jackson, S.C. But a major factor, he said, is a misunderstanding of what marriage should be and how much work it involves.
“A lot of folks just have this feeling that love should be a natural thing,” Carr said, “and when the love stops then the marriage must end, rather than thinking ... love is going to be up and down and ... it needs to be maintained.”
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