Stigma: Divorce, Cohabitation, Troops - 7/05

Thu Jul 21 20:53:02 EDT 2005

- WHERE HAS ALL THE STIGMA GONE?
- ONCE A STIGMA, DIVORCE IS NOW PART OF THE U.S. LIFESTYLE
- TROOPS' STRUGGLES IN IRAQ INCLUDE FAILING MARRIAGES

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- WHERE HAS ALL THE STIGMA GONE?

This week's news is getting me down -- the reports that there is no longer a
stigma against divorce, against cohabitation, against dumping your soldier
husband while he's away at war....   Of course, this isn't anything new, but
I guess what's depressing me are reporters calling and treating this like
it's "progress" -- asking me if I think it's a good thing that the stigmas
are falling?   auuuuugh.
It's especially painful at Smart Marriages where we believe the fading
stigmas are based on the flawed thinking that a successful marriage is all
about "finding the right person".  No Fault divorce is based on the notion
that "It ain't nobody's fault if they married the wrong person".
Cohabitation is based on the idea that "If I live with you before I marry
you, I'll improve my odds at success."  auuugh.  Seems we work so hard at
getting accurate information out there and these myths persist.

Maybe it's the heat, but I'm feeling awfully discouraged.  - diane

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- ONCE A STIGMA, DIVORCE IS NOW PART OF THE U.S. LIFESTYLE

Kathy Shayna Shocket
The Arizona Republic
Jul. 21, 2005 

Actress Sandra Bullock secretly married Monster Garage's reality-TV star
Jesse James this past weekend. It's his third marriage. Larry King has been
to the altar six times. Billy Bob Thornton five. Tom Cruise has been
boasting about his third wife-to-be. And Prince Charles walked down the
royal aisle for the second time with a worldwide audience. But celebrities
aren't the only ones changing partners.

Recent statistics show that almost half of those who marry in the United
States split before death do they part. Many experts also agree that the
stigma of divorce is waning.

"Divorce has become more commonplace in the popular culture - among
celebrities and even public figures," said David Popenoe co-director of the
National Marriage Project at Rutgers University. "And we tend to take our
cues from news, movies, books and magazines. The whole feeling about divorce
has shifted from one of abhorrence to acceptable."
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This week the National Marriage Project released its annual "State of Our
Unions 2005" report. The project's statistics show that the divorce rate in
the United States is down (along with the marriage rate, and cohabitation is
increasing). Popenoe and most experts agree that divorce and multiple
marriages are no longer taboo.

Just ask Phoenix attorney Jerry Lewkowitz. Divorce was a major reason the
former Phoenix city councilman didn't seek re-election in 1975.

"I felt a terrible stigma about my divorce, and Adlai Stevenson's divorce
was such an issue {ellipsis} when he was running for president, and I was
very sensitive to the fact," says Lewkowitz, 70, who has been married three
times.

Thirty years later, Lewkowitz wouldn't let his marital status drive a
business decision. "Look at the last election. Here's John Kerry - a
Catholic - and divorced. I'm not ashamed of it at all, and my friends who
want to know about divorce now affectionately say, 'Talk to Jerry, he's an
expert.' "

Today, more people comment on his third wife's age. "Eddie Basha will often
joke with me and say, 'So how's your daughter?' " referring to Lewkowitz's
wife, Andrea, 30 years his junior. The couple have been married 12 years.

According to the National Center for Health Statistics, there were about
23,000 divorces in Arizona in 2004, compared with approximately 34,000
marriages. "People are living longer now and bound to get remarried, and
divorce becomes the norm rather than the exception," says Aaron Krasnow, a
psychologist at Arizona State University. "Although I think kids are still
affected by a divorce, it is no longer something that they have to be
ashamed of."

Kathleen Waldron of ASU's College of Human Services agrees. "Many people in
their 20s have what we now commonly call starter marriages, find they aren't
compatible, then marry someone else. A lot of them rebound and many times
bring the same mistakes and issues into another marriage. It's not so
uncommon for people to say they got wiser by the third marriage."

Getting wise is what Pam Earnhardt, 60, says she did after her first two
marriages. Her third husband is Tex Earnhardt, 74. It's the car dealer's
fourth marriage. The Earnhardts met through friends and joked about the fact
that two of Tex's wives were named Pam. Now the third Pam has been married
to Tex for 15 years.

"When I was first divorced years ago, I'm sure some people did a lot of
talking behind my back, but society is so different now," says Tex, who
first married at 23 years old. "It wasn't bad luck, but no luck at all, but
I have nothing bad to say about my past marriages. We just grew apart."

"Why stay in a marriage you are not happy in?" Pam says. "Today, especially
without the stigma there's no reason to stay and be unhappy."

Waldron says statistics on multiple marriages are scarce because most of the
studies ask if one is married, widowed or divorced, but don't ask how many
times. "The stigma of divorce began to really disappear with the passing of
the no-fault divorce law in the '70s," she says. "The previous options such
as cruelty, abandonment, abuse and infidelity had more stigma attached to
them."

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- TROOPS' STRUGGLES IN IRAQ INCLUDE FAILING MARRIAGES
Seattle Times
July 17, 2005
By Faye Fiore

No stigma left about waiting for Johnny to come marching home.....

> "They come back, and their accounts are gone. It's not unique anymore," said
> Michael White, a leading family-law attorney. Indeed, the Army recently
> instituted a program for single soldiers titled "How Not to Marry a Jerk."

> The Army divorce rate has jumped more than 80 percent since the fighting began
> overseas in response to Sept. 11. The courts around Fort Hood, the Army's
> largest post, may have to add another judge just to handle the caseload.
> Divorce lawyers hire extra staffers whenever a division prepares to come home.
> 
> To a soldier in battle, the threat of a family falling apart can be a
> dangerous distraction. "That's probably the worst part about being over
> there," said Hall, now back at Fort Hood and facing a marriage so damaged it
> may not survive. "Your wife's cheating on you, you know she's been spending
> all your money the entire time, and there's nothing you can do about it. You
> think about that more than you do a bomb on the side of the road."

KILLEEN, Texas ‹ Most of the men in 4th Squad, Charlie Battery, fought two
wars while they were in Iraq. There was the war against the insurgents that
had them patrolling for roadside bombs and raiding houses at all hours. Then
there was the war back home, which had them struggling, over phone lines
from 7,000 miles away, to keep their marriages and their bank accounts
intact.

They say they eventually got used to the bombs. The crazy possibility of
dying any minute didn't haunt them so much. But that other war, that was the
one that tore them up in the downtime spent in Sgt. Brent Cox's trailer at
Camp Victory. It would get quiet, and then one or another of them would ask:
"So, how are things going at home?" And they would begin to brood.

Cox, 36, and his wife, Kristina, were expecting their first child after 12
years of marriage.

Pvt. Ray Hall, 21, was married to his high-school sweetheart, an airman
first class stationed in San Antonio.

Spc. Jason Garcia, 23, believed that his on-again, off-again relationship
with the mother of his then-2-year-old son was on again; he had given her
his ATM card as a gesture of commitment.

But on the long-awaited day in February when the three soldiers returned
here to Fort Hood, turned in their rifles and stood on the parade field,
only Hall had a sweetheart there to meet him. And he found himself wishing
she hadn't come at all.

After surviving Iraq, thousands of soldiers have become casualties of a
fight they were poorly trained for: keeping control of their family lives
during the separation of war. Men and women who feel lucky that their units
suffered few fatalities say they can name dozens who returned home to empty
houses, squandered bank accounts, divorce papers and restraining orders.

Rising toll on relationships

The Army divorce rate has jumped more than 80 percent since the fighting
began overseas in response to Sept. 11. The courts around Fort Hood, the
Army's largest post, may have to add another judge just to handle the
caseload. Divorce lawyers hire extra staffers whenever a division prepares
to come home.

To a soldier in battle, the threat of a family falling apart can be a
dangerous distraction. "That's probably the worst part about being over
there," said Hall, now back at Fort Hood and facing a marriage so damaged it
may not survive. "Your wife's cheating on you, you know she's been spending
all your money the entire time, and there's nothing you can do about it. You
think about that more than you do a bomb on the side of the road."

For some in the 4th Squad, the tensions played out nightly in Camp Victory's
"Internet cafe" ‹ the Army trailer with rows of computers where soldiers
flocked to contact their families. Some found more pain there than comfort.
Cox's wife was five months pregnant when she announced she was leaving him
and going back home to Lawton, Okla.

Hall visited the trailer less often after he checked the phone messages on
his home answering machine and heard another man tell his wife he loved her.

Garcia stopped hearing from his girlfriend and started tracking his bank
account. He says thousands of dollars of his saved pay was gone and she had
found somebody else.

There are six men in the squad, and five of them saw their marriages or
relationships come under severe pressure. One relationship survived and
three didn't; the fate of the fifth is unresolved. Concentrating on the
mission became hard. Sitting in a Humvee, waiting for orders to roll out,
the men would think about how life at home was falling apart, and they could
do little about it.

"When we go outside that gate and into Baghdad, you've got to have your head
straight," said Cox, who now lives alone in an apartment at Fort Hood.
"You're trying to stay alive, but your mind goes to back home. Whatever
problem you had before you left escalates because you're not there. ... I
just wish she would have talked to me."

Whether by accident or design, the Army encourages its soldiers to marry.
The best housing goes to families, leaving single soldiers to share the
barracks. Wages are higher for active-duty soldiers with dependents, and
higher still for those sent overseas, where the pay is tax-free.
Hazardous-duty and family-separation supplements can amount to several
hundred dollars a month.

Soldiers tend to enlist and marry young: Just 1 percent of the civilian
population under 20 is married, compared with nearly 14 percent of military
members in the same age group, said Shelley MacDermid, co-director of the
Military Family Research Institute at Purdue University.

"These early, young marriages are not a great recipe for marital longevity,"
MacDermid said. "Research on divorce shows that. Add to that the anxiety
associated with a dangerous job, and it doesn't bode well."

The deadline for going to war is among the most powerful incentives to rush
a wedding. This time around, those unions are being tested by the longest
and most recurrent deployments in the history of the volunteer military.

Married or not, soldiers are encouraged to assign powers of attorney to
people they trust to monitor their finances while they are overseas. Some
hand over their ATM cards and sign blank checks to people they hardly know.

"They come back, and their accounts are gone. It's not unique anymore," said
Michael White, a leading family-law attorney. Indeed, the Army recently
instituted a program for single soldiers titled "How Not to Marry a Jerk."

Kristina Cox lasted two months in Killeen after her husband deployed. She
packed up and went back to her mother in Oklahoma to have her baby. She
declined to be interviewed, but her divorce attorney, Arthur South,
described the 12-year marriage as another casualty of the war.

"She's finding out that she doesn't need him. That's what happens," said
South, who has handled his share of military divorces. "The gals get
married, they are kind of young, and all of a sudden the husband is gone for
months. They find out they can write checks, mow the lawn.

"This is a real tragedy of war."

Deployment strengthens the strong marriages and breaks the weak, Army brass
often say. But 4th Squad member Spc. Lance Fernandez and his wife, Emily,
say it damages the strong ones too.

In Iraq, watching his baby daughter grow up via Webcam, he bounced between
doubt and faith, listening to his friends' despair and his wife's
reassurances.

"This whole deployment really messed up a whole lot of marriages," said
Fernandez, 23. "I can see six or eight months ‹ it has to be done. But
anything longer than that takes too much out of the marriage. My little girl
is still getting to know me."

Fernandez's marriage survived. Cox's is over.

As for Hall, the stranger's voice on the phone that day still hurts. He's
talking divorce; his wife, Airman 1st Class Melissa Hall, 22, is struggling
to hold them together.

They married right out of Central High in Duluth, Minn. She says she tried
to write or e-mail every day while he was in Iraq. But when the Air Force
moved her to Randolph, near San Antonio, she had no friends, and he seemed
very far away.

"I did kind of meet someone, but it was just friends. I needed emotional
support," she said in a telephone interview.

The day the men of the 4th Squad came home and the buses deposited them on
the parade field at Fort Hood, families filled the bleachers while the
soldiers assembled in their desert camouflage dress. Once dismissed, each
side broke free in a tearful, joyous search. Fathers met their babies for
the first time. Husbands nearly squeezed the breath out of their wives.
Fernandez held onto Emily as he never had before.

In the euphoric chaos, Brent Cox was pretty sure Kristina wouldn't be there,
but he searched anyway. Garcia knew no one would meet him.

Melissa Hall had driven down from San Antonio and searched for her husband
in the crowd. He didn't hug her. They spent the weekend fighting.

Off-duty and back in the Killeen countryside one warm night, Ray Hall stood
outside a bull-riding ring watching one of his buddies get bucked to the
ground for $5 a try. He took another beer and thought back to the day he
heard the voice on the phone.

"I had to go out on patrol with Garcia and my sergeant. I was like, 'You
can't think about this right now. That's when people get blown up.' "

Back then, he found a way to put it aside. Now, he can't.

Copyright © 2005 The Seattle Times Company

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