Beyond the Article - Male Military Spouses

(Expanded Article)

Photo by Picsea on Unsplash

"A lot of us have given up careers … became the default parent," Michael Franklin, podcast host, Air Force spouse, and stay-at-home dad told me recently.

"The feeling from the DoD is still that it is a male-centric workforce so we just need to get all the resources to the female spouses," he added, describing how male spouses have quietly observed a lack of support. "The difference is men are less likely to actually come out and say that it's a problem. We're a lot more likely to sit back and say we'll figure it out."

As of 2022, 9.7% of all military spouses are male. There's sizable variation based on branch of service: Just 3.8% of Marine Corps spouses identified as male, compared to a high of 13.8% in the Air Force.

Those roughly 10% face unique challenges, according to research by the Defense Department and Blue Star Families. Male spouses die by suicide at higher rates than female spouses, and female service members married to male civilians have the highest divorce rates in the military.

According to the DoD's Annual Report on Suicide in the Military CY2022, "Male spouses accounted for about 48% of spouse suicides but made up about 14% of all military spouses across the DoD."

Male spouses in the community describe a kind of isolation that comes with being in a group some outsiders don't expect to exist. Instead, what was once a demographic anomaly, a byproduct of a male-dominated military, has become increasingly likely as women have taken on more roles in uniform and "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" fades into history.

"I can count on one hand the number of times people either in her unit, her squadron or chain of command, or anybody has called to check on me. And she's deployed three times. And two of those times were back-to-back deployments," said Franklin. "We go through all the same struggles that other spouses go through. It just seems like we're kind of expected to figure it out."

If the military is a "boy's club," then the military spouse community is at risk of being considered a "girls' club." Despite intentional efforts to combat these gendered traditions, replacing the term "wife" with the more inclusive "spouse," male military spouses may still feel like outsiders.

Go Beyond the Article

How can a female military spouse possibly summarize the experiences of male military spouses? I was beyond intimidated to write this article. So I turned to the data and set up as many interviews as I could from as diverse group of male spouses as I could find. I talked to males who were veterans, civilians, same-sex partners, those who grew up surrounded by the military and those who still want nothing to do with it despite being married to a service member. As you might expect their experiences were quite different.

But as data often does, their stories revealed certain patterns of behavior. My military.com column highlighted many of those patterns. Keep reading below to see what else I learned.