The Anger of Absence

"Absence makes the heart grow fonder," goes a classic one-liner, "of someone else." By necessity, the U.S. armed services often separate men from their wives for a year or more. Several recent psychiatric studies indicate that for most of the marriages, absence can make a wife's heart grow gloomy, resentful, alcoholic, hypochondriacal or even suicidal well before thoughts of adultery or divorce set in. Far from making "December June," as Tennyson once put it, reunion often leads to fights or sexual frigidity.

The implications for civilian life are just beginning to be explored, but military research into the consequences of separation may eventually shed some light on the marital problems of hard-pressed executives who work evenings and weekends and jet away on frequent business trips. Such "corporate bigamists," torn by their conflicting dedications to wife and job, have become an increasing concern of management consultants and psychiatrists.

Building Belief. Depression is most likely to afflict the wives of servicemen if they think that their husband's absence is pointless. Navy Rear Admiral John M. Alford, a personnel expert who conducted a recent one-year survey of Navy life, says that when the tone of a husband's letters about his work changes from eagerness to boredom, wives swing from resolution to discouragement. So far, no systematic study has been made on the effects of wifely missives. New Haven Psychiatrist Houston Macintosh found that the spouses of Air Force men, virtually all of whom volunteer for their branch of service, suffer fewer pangs than the wives of presumably less enthusiastic Army draftees. In recent months, widespread public discouragement over the Viet Nam war has begun to bother military wives. "A man will do anything, and his wife will cheerfully accept it, if there's a good reason," says another Pentagon admiral, "but if confidence in the worth of the job or activity is undermined, then trouble follows shortly."

A wife's emotional makeup is often the decisive element in aggravating the outcome of a lengthy separation. Women who lost one parent while they were children or whose parents wrangled constantly often lack "a chance to build up a belief in a benign environment," says Navy Psychiatrist Chester Pearlman. They develop severe doubts about whether people who leave them will ever return and never acquire the crucial "capacity to be alone." Dr. Richard Isay, a psychiatrist at the Yale University School of Medicine who has studied wives of submarine sailors, says that extreme dependency is common in wives who never fully break from strong childhood attachments to their mothers. Such women unconsciously come to view their husbands as a source of the same security that their mothers provided and veer easily into breakdowns when their men are away.

At least one study belies the widely held idea that women with tranquil marriages cope well with separation whereas those with stormy relationships crack up. Psychiatrists at Washington's Walter Reed General Hospital observed the families of 23 Army noncommissioned officers sent abroad for average tours of 13 months. The investigators found that calm, older women, who seemed most deeply attached to their relatives or rooted to military routines, were often the most likely to give in to sadness and discouragement when their husbands left. Such wives, says Medical Corps Psychiatrist Laurence A. Cove, often seemed to try to suppress their anxieties, sometimes by escapist "thinking about how good the next assignment would be." By contrast, several "unhappy and emotionally delicate" wives developed independent activities and a new sense of self-fulfillment in their spouses' absence. Frequently they were able to give healthy vent to their anger at the military by reducing their involvement with military life and becoming more active in social and community affairs.

Love Slaves. Resenting the man they miss is a common reaction among wives with severe separation pangs. "It's a natural reaction to be angry," says Detroit Psychiatrist Emanuel Tanay. "You certainly can't feel loving toward the source of your depression." One compensation is withdrawal into the solace of pills or liquor, or into a social frenzy that produces "emotional anesthesia." Other wives retaliate--occasionally with infidelity, more often by giving their returning husbands a chilly reception. "When he's away," one submariner's wife told Dr. Isay, "there's nothing on my mind but him and getting him home. But when he comes home, I think of all the help he hasn't given me, and I get angry and moody. I just don't want him near me."

Occasionally, Navy Psychiatrist Pearlman has found wives with such a "pervasive masochistic attitude" about their marriage that they go to the opposite extreme. Bottling up their anger, they convince themselves that their husbands are always right and become "love slaves, allowing themselves to be taken for granted and exploited." The accumuated tensions sometimes disperse after a good fight, and in many cases brief psychotherapy resolves the problem, but Pearlman reports that untreated hostilities can upset a household for weeks--and recur with each separation.

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