When the War Comes Home: Shifts in Marriage after Reunions with Combat Deployed Soldiers

• In Event: 208 - Section on the Sociology of the Family Paper Session. Hard Times for Families in Hard Social Spaces

Abstract

Fifteen months separated by war is not an experience easily integrated into a family. This presentation focuses on the accounts of post-combat reunions from wives of regular army and national guard soldiers who have served in at least one overseas deployment since 2001. This reunion period was the one during which participants in both groups most feared for the survival of their marriages. Yet despite the difficulties of reunion, most of these marriages remained intact. The resilience of these relationships is rooted in how wives during the reunion period both re-think and re-work the emotions and justifications at the basis of their marriages. Given the study’s comparative model, we also see how different structural contexts affect the different emotion work that wives facing an otherwise similar difficulty (reintegrating a returning soldier into their family) must perform. Regular army wives, living immersed within largely military institutions and communities, must shift their thinking at reunion away from commitment in a companionate marriage toward obligation in a reciprocal and even contractual exchange. The conditions they face upon reunion force a number of adaptations: thinking about being an army wife as a job, advocating for their soldier-husbands, and establishing limits to what they will endure. National guard wives, living within largely civilian contexts, benefit from ritually marked transitions that indicate their period of military, duty-driven sacrifice is complete and a period of civilian, “normal” marital commitment can commence.

Author

• Phillip Noel Fucella, University of California-Berkeley