What You Need to Know About Military Divorce

February 02, 2010
by Rebekah Sanderlin

Part One - Deciding to Divorce and Finding a Lawyer

Stephanie W., an Army wife living at Fort Bragg, NC, was furious and devastated last year when she returned home from a girls’ weekend to Myrtle Beach, SC to discover that her husband had cheated on her with another woman while she was gone.

“Betrayal doesn’t even begin to describe what he did,” Stephanie said, adding that their two kids had been sleeping in their bedrooms while her husband and the other woman were having sex in the master bedroom of their home. Her older child had seen the woman leaving the next morning and told Stephanie about the stranger. All but caught in the act, Stephanie’s husband confessed to having a one-night stand and he and Stephanie began attending couples therapy to try to piece their almost eight-year-marriage back together.

Now, a year after discovering the infidelity and subsequently learning that he had cheated other times, too, Stephanie and her husband have decided that their marriage is too far gone to fix. They are in the early stages of dividing their once-joined lives and both are considering what the future holds for them – personally, financially and legally. 

Few people enter into marriage with a plan to get divorced, but according to The National Marriage Project (http://www.virginia.edu/marriageproject), between 40 and 50 percent of all first marriages in the U.S. will end in divorce. Several factors, such as marrying before the age of 25, having children early in the marriage, not having a college education and earning less than $50,000 – factors that are often present in military marriages – cause the the divorce rate to jump even higher than the oft-cited 40 to 50 percent statistic. Add in the strains of long deployments and other separations, and the divorce rate in the military is likely much higher than in the civilian world, though there is no accurate data available on the military divorce rate.

Divorce is painful, often messy, and few people get through it feeling like they’ve won much of anything, but like most things in life, early planning and research often yield better results.

Marsha Thole is a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force Reserves and she co-authored a book called Divorce and the Military II (available for purchase at http://www.americanretirees.org/). She assists lawyers all over the country working with military clients on divorce matters. Thole said she got interested in the topic after enduring her own divorce.

“It’s a bad time in your life but the more involved you get, the faster you will be able to get on with your life and get past this,” she said. “Very few people die from a divorce. You will eventually get through it – maybe not over it – but through it.”

She suggests that anyone considering divorce find a good lawyer early in the process in order to understand all of the options. However, she cautions that in such an emotionally charged situation people should keep in mind what the lawyer is actually there to do.

“Your lawyer is not your therapist or your best friend, Thole said. “He will charge you as much to listen to you as to talk to you. It’s important for you to have a good support system, but if you use your lawyer as your support system it will get very expensive.”

Stephanie has begun researching attorneys but has not yet settled on one. She said she knows former Army wives who sought legal assistance from JAG lawyers but that she does not think that a military lawyer will have her best interests at heart. For the time being, she is spending a lot of time online, surfing the web for information so that she knows as much as possible.

“There’s a lot of myths out there,” Stephanie said. “A lot of women go through a divorce thinking one thing and then they find out when it’s too late that they could have gotten more.”

Mary Commander, a divorce lawyer in Norfolk, Va., who estimates that half of her clients are connected to the military, said that typically JAG lawyers will help with basic legal document filing but that they usually are not able to help with more complex matters because they often are not licensed to practice law in the state where they reside.

She said that The Virginia Bar Association (www.vba.org) has a referral program that offers an initial consultation with a lawyer for just $35 and that other states may have similar programs. The program is an inexpensive way for someone early in the divorce process to make a plan and learn her options, Commander said. Even if a couple is splitting amicably and have worked out many of the divorce details themselves, Commander said they should each consult their own lawyers to look over everything before either party signs any documents.

“You just need somebody to give it a once over to make sure you didn’t miss something,” she said.

When hiring a divorce lawyer Commander said that people connected to the military need to find someone in the state where they plan to file for divorce who knows the local divorce laws well and is familiar with all of the issues that make military divorces unique.

“Divorce laws are very particular to each state and every state is different,” Commander said. “Also, if divorce law is not your full-time thing you shouldn’t be giving advice. “Always ask, don’t assume, but probably divorce lawyers in large military areas are going to be familiar with military law.”