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Comment by andrewfong | Hacker News Reader

I'm a little surprised the military divorce rate is so low. With the long periods of separation, I'd expect it to be higher.

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Military does cut spouses checks, so there is direct financial incentive to remain married (at least on paper).

Long deployments / remote spousing also leave room for other arrangements. As long as the checks come in, why not remain married in name only?

Because adultery is something you get smacked for by the military legal system.

I know servicepeople get punished for adultery under UCMJ, but do their spouses?

If the spouse is a civilian then no. Civilians are not subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

They don't but it takes two people to make a marriage.

"Staying married in name only" means anyone under the UCMJ can't have sex _ever_ if its a marriage in name only.

As far as I understand it, they are not going to go digging if nobody is making a fuss.

Which means the one under the UCMJ is open to blackmail from their spouse if they fool around in a marriage in name only.

Yeah. Totally a reason to stay married in name only.

I guess, but the parent posts are describing a mutually beneficial arrangement.

I might be biased by the experience my friend from high school had up until he completed his service and got himself honorably discharged to make it stop.

It started out voluntary enough but the lack of a sex life led to that sort of problem.

Well, a vindictive spouse hardly needs the military to make your life difficult.

Getting married is a pretty big lifestyle change for enlisted soldiers. It enables them to go from living in a barracks to having private housing with their spouse. That is a non-trivial factor weighing in on the decision for many of them.

Most military positions aren't overseas or combat-related. I'd imagine it would be higher for those ones though.

A lot of the stereotypes we have about members of the military aren't grounded in anything but popular fiction.

It's actually a crime for military members to commit adultery, and it's taken pretty seriously (at least in the units I've been in). One can imagine that the penalty for adultery has an impact on divorce rates.

ETA: It's also illegal even if you are single but sleep with somebody who's married (whether the married person is military or not).

Curious, do they make allowances for swingers and the like, where the extramarital sex is consensual?

All extramarital is still illegal, consensual included.

The government has to prove that a person's conduct has direct negative impact on the military. If the acts are consensual, but it causes social problems later that's enough to get the person in trouble

It's taken so seriously that those involved tend to almost never talk about it. They still cheat at the same rate as anyone else

"It's not cheating if it happened on deployment" is practically a meme. How seriously it's taken seems pretty inconsistent, to say the least.

Infidelity is definitely higher, maybe they are better at keeping secrets?

They call it "opsec".

I don't understand why someone would get married right before their new spouse is about to be deployed to a combat zone.

Given they'll be gone a long time and the increased chances they'll come back missing parts or a Different Person (like Frodo after that little Ring adventure).

If you're dating and you die in combat, your girlfriend gets nothing. If you're married and you die, your wife gets $550k, assuming you've filled out the right paperwork. For a lot of people that's a good incentive.

Hmmm, $550k vs a lifetime of seeing your S.O. only a few months a year and a high prob they could be killed anytime thanks to Endless War.

I'm in the It's-Not-For-Everybody category.

People take a lot of risks that don't necessarily make pure logical sense when it comes to relationships.

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