"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.