Roles and Responsibilities for Military Couples, Part 2 of 3

Why Military Couples Struggle to Move Away from Traditional Gender Roles

The fact that we are in general stepping away from tradition determining roles in marriage and parenting is a really great thing in that it makes space for other potentially more beneficial options. That said, the generally known fact that change happens slower in the military seems to apply here as well. It tends to be harder for military couples to organize themselves around more contemporary roles which prioritize equality when one member of the couple is frequently (and often by surprise or without notice) taken from the home for days, weeks, months, or my favorite “to be determined” lengths of time. There are many military couples (probably even the majority) who consider themselves nontraditional, or valuing equality over traditional gender roles in the home, but who nonetheless slide into traditional roles due to deployments and duty, field exercises and night shifts. How can my partner and I have equal roles and responsibilities when they are home a fraction of the time that I am? Moreover, isn’t it wrong to expect my partner to take up half of the workload at home when they already spend such long hours at work?

***Note that the slip into traditional gender roles happens also for dual military couples, same sex couples, and many couples who end up taking a gender role that does not align with their actual gender. Common examples of these are the female Marine who is expected to leave work for childcare issues instead of her male Marine husband, or the male stay-at-home-Dad spouse married to the female Sailor. The military lifestyle makes it particularly difficult to maintain equality regardless of sexual preference and gender identity. ***

I typically see couples a few years into their participation in traditional gender roles (whether by design or accident) who are fed up and have come wanting help to feel a greater sense of balance and connection in their relationship. Spouses feel like Service Members never help around the house or wouldn’t know how to if they tried, while Service Members feel constantly criticized and unable to catch a break between work and home. Over time their conversations have eroded as they become less and less able to relate to one another and cling progressively more tightly to their own agendas within the relationship. Despite deeply loving one another, they find themselves feeling that the other doesn’t truly understand or care about their needs. One says, “I need help at home” while the other says “I would help if I wasn’t so tired” or “if I didn’t feel constantly criticized.”

The military lifestyle can encourage traditional gender role participation which can then lead to disengagement from the same relationships that are supposed to give you back energy. One thing that military couples know well is how much worse it can be for your partner to be gone sometimes than gone all the time. To have the service member home but “in and out” rather than totally gone for a known length of time (excluding when they are sent into danger of course) can be highly stressful. It’s not just about the unknown element which makes it hard to plan your lives; this home then gone dynamic creates intense pressure to be flexible and responsive to myriad situations. The couple needs to be fully engaged and present when the service member is home but also prepared to have him called away at a moment’s notice without the home falling into chaos. They need to be ready for their reunion despite not knowing when it will be but also be completely fine and functional while separate. It’s easy for couples in this situation to feel like they are playing limbo a foot off the ground. It is even easier to fall back into those traditional gender roles which tend to ultimately set partners against each other. If the servicemember’s only responsibility to the family is to work, then not much needs to change when they’re gone for work. In this way, couples often find themselves pushing the service member out of any roles in which they would be missed out of self-preservation.

Worse yet, years of work have made each partner an expert in their own role. Not only do they know how to do what they do, they’ve developed skill and mastery at it. The timing of when couples tend to get fed up with traditional roles and are looking for rebalancing often corresponds with childcare and parenting workloads being at their highest, creating a higher need for skill and efficiency. It is not a coincidence that couples seem to suffer most from the imbalance gender role division creates when they have young children, and it certainly doesn’t make things easy to correct. No primary parent spouse wants to train their active-duty partner in how to schedule, keep, and execute a successful doctor’s appointment for their four-year-old when they could just do it themselves, the right way the first time. We want to walk the path of least resistance when it comes to role division, and so the cycle continues, getting worse or more entrenched as it goes.

Another important consideration in how the military lifestyle pushes couples into a more traditional role division is the way that a long or demanding workday encourages a service member to be uninvolved in their home and family life after work. Many service members don’t get to go home after work, and many who do are getting home with only an hour or two left before bedtime after working themselves ragged during the day. No one, including their tired and overburdened partners, wants to tell those people that they should be doing more work when they get home. The family shifts to accommodate rest for those service members by having all the care tasks fall onto the shoulders of the stay-at-home partner. Imagine the service member who sits on the couch scrolling their phone at night while mom finishes up helping with homework, getting the kids through bath time, or cleaning up the kitchen after cooking. In come traditional gender roles, to “save” the service member from exhaustion by cutting them off from the systems and relationships in which they could find energy, personal growth, and life satisfaction. It seems like they would be less tired because they have less work once they’re home, in the same way it seems like taking a nap when we’re depressed will give you more energy (if you’ve never been depressed, it doesn’t). We need to invest time and energy into the things we care about for them to give energy back to us, and unfortunately that doesn’t stop being true if you’ve had a long workday.

With all this in mind, I think it’s safe to say two things, 1) finding complete equality in roles and responsibilities in a military relationship is impossible, and 2) it’s still important to try. Despite the difficulty that military couples face in extricating themselves from traditional roles and finding more balance, I still recommend making the effort for most couples as a hugely protective factor for the health of the marriage and the family by extension.

If reading this has made you curious about how to rebalance roles and find greater equality in your relationship as a military service member or spouse, check out part three, where I suggest steps for rebalancing for military couples.