Military vs. Marriage

As a military attorney married to a civilian attorney, any newspaper column titled "The Military vs. Marriages" is sure to get my attention; this one has been making the rounds since it was published in The Washington Post on Monday:

The U.S. Army recently announced that it would pay captains up to $35,000 in retention bonuses to stem the tide of junior officers leaving the Army, in part because of the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq. Bonuses may temporarily retain a few captains, but the problem will continue well into the future unless policymakers address a more fundamental issue: A military lifestyle makes the pursuit of a career nearly untenable for military wives.

While there are a few lines in the column tinged with too much self-pity, the fundamentals are spot on. The military system, with frequent PCS moves and deployments, places serious obstacles on any military spouse who simply wants to work or go to school. As the column's author is an attorney, she also identifies the issues faced by military spouses, like mine, who are pursuing professional careers their own:

Professionally licensed wives such as teachers (yes, and lawyers) are hit hard. Most licensed professions are regulated by states. Therefore, wives must test for, and pay for, new licenses with each move. In many professions, spouses get no credit for experience in other states, yet they must continue to pay annual fees to each state in which they are licensed. The process gets prohibitively expensive, forcing spouses to either pay hundreds of dollars per year to maintain licenses in multiple states (which is desirable, since the family may eventually be assigned back to that state) or relinquish the licenses they worked so hard to obtain.

And this is just the licensing aspect. This does not even touch on the employability of a military spouse whose roots in a community are never older than two or three years and whose Frankenstein-like resume would scare off employers looking for more than temporary help. What sort of legal practice is possible under such circumstances?

Of course the lawyer/lawyer marriage is going to pose special challenges. But this column makes clear that the basic problems are endemic to any military marriage where the spouse wants more than a purely domestic life.