Today was Military Spouse Appreciation Day. A few days ago the President honored six recipients of the President’s Volunteer Service Awards, and it was nice to see that one of the six is an Air Force husband who has done a lot of fundraising for military family programs.
I found it noticeable that the White House ceremony included a male, civilian husband, because I know there are others out there even if they seem to be rare in the milspouse community. After all, more than 200,000 active-duty servicemembers are women and they aren’t all single or dual-military! Or are they?
If you look on the web, you would hardly know that there are civilian husbands of servicemembers. Take a look at the images on the Military Spouse website, for an example. Whether in the civilian news media or the many websites serving the military community, about the only place “spouse” always includes men is on the official DoD websites or in the President’s proclamation. Actually, to be fair, the National Military Family Association (which was originally formed as the Military Wives Association) does a good job of being inclusive. Still, there are others who think that using “spouse” is political correctness run amok and long for the old days.
But what does the data show? Several papers on military marriages do not include female servicemembers or dual-military couples because the sample sizes are too small for whatever statistical analysis they are trying to do. Everything I have read suggests that civilian husbands are extremely rare, and definitely more so than dual-military couples.
And then I uncovered this: About half of all officers are married, and 39 percent of those couples are dual-military (42% and 49% for enlisted). If you want to see something very interesting, look at the number of male servicemembers who are married to another servicemember. [The full research paper, based on 2002 data, is here.]
The data suggests why I have run into other civilian husbands — whether at work or when buying a Christmas tree from a volunteer firefighter — despite my thinking that I am the oddity. Roughly speaking, I’m estimating that there are just over 42,000 civilian husbands out there. Very few compared to the number of civilian wives, but enough to get at least one or two loads of laundry done.
