David H. Petraeus and his wife, Holly, and their two grown children had “long been viewed by military families as an inspiration, a model for making a marriage work despite the separation and hardship of long deployments overseas,” write Scott Shane and Sheryl Gay Stolberg in an article about the rise and fall of Gen. Petraeus, who resigned as director of the Central Intelligence Agency on Friday (Nov. 9, 2012) after admitting to an extramarital affair.
The article concluded with a comment from Jacey Eckhart, the spouse editor for the Web site military.com, who said the fact that the Petraeuses had been married for so long, and survived so many separations, was a source of inspiration to younger military couples:
The sense was they had a strong marriage, that this was a functioning relationship, that they had good kids. It’s one of those relationships that you look up to: if they can do it, we can do it. This is what success looks like. So this is shocking. This is what it looks like when a hero falls.On the At War blog, Rebekah Sanderlin has posted a poignant account of her years as an Army wife. She points out that while there is a wealth of advice on how to deal with separation and the single-parent household, “post-deployment reintegration barely merits a mention in most of these resources, and usually then only with a throwaway sentence that admonishes us to “give it time” and to “expect difficulty.””
Military duty in particular — but also other professions that require people to travel a lot or work away from home for long periods of time — can put serious strains on marriages and family life. Cellphones, email and Skype allow more connection among family members and loved ones, but are no substitute for being there.
http://rendezvous.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/12/when-a-spouse-is-posted-abroad/
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