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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.