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DH's job & divorce statistics and mini-vent re: men
** it will help you understand if you remember that firefighters spend 1/3 of their lives together, away from home. Eat together, sleep together, work together, play together. It's a 2nd family to them. **
DH just informed me that another firefighter on his department is getting divorced.
This means that in the past two years alone, the divorce rate is right around 20% in his department. That only includes those who have actually filed. And only since Jan 2010. So really only about 16 months.
clarification: 20% of firefighters at his dept have filed for divorce in the past 16 months
I told him they need to look into hiring a permanent marriage counselor to be on staff.
Anyway, DH says "what's really weird is it's almost always the wife leaving the husband, and not always for another man". Keep in mind that it's a fire dept, so it's wives leaving firefighters.
I kept my mouth shut, because he seemed upset, but in his mind would it not be weird if it were the other way around?
So my co-worker (male) overheard our phone conversation and asked for details. I told him. And his response? That in his experience women in misery like company and that if a woman sees her friends, or even her husband's coworker's wives getting divorced (he actually said that!), she thinks the grass is greener and will get divorced too, over "any little thing".
Really?!? I mean, really?!?
Okay, I know it's only two men (which is why this is a mini-vent), but I'm a little irritated that both of their immediate reactions seemed to dismiss the idea that these wives could have legitimate reasons for leaving their husbands. That despite the fact that it's the husbands that all have something in common, their assumption is that it's the wives' behavior that is "weird".
There is a problem in the culture there, and I am not joking when I tell DH that I think for our marriage he should probably find a new job. Something is wrong.
Re: DH's job & divorce statistics and mini-vent re: men
I would guess that FF, police, military, etc are super stressful jobs that require the spouse spend lots of time away from the family. I'm sure the other spouse gets tired of being along, being the "only" parent, etc. & I can understand how a woman (or the non FF husbands) would leave. I mean really, if you're running the household/family most of the time you might just feel like you'd be better off alone/single. Also, my feeling is that people who leave for another person/affair aren't leaving b/c they fell madly in love with someone else, they're leaving b/c they're unhappy with their marriage.
And the co-worker is just stupid.
Also, many factors play into the 50% rate. 2nd, 3rd, etc divorices are factored into that rate so I think it's too simple or generalized to say that OP shouldn't worry if her husband's co-workers are at a 20% rate when the rest of the country has a 50% chance of divorice. She sees a problem and that's all that really matters.
Anyway, I think you and your DH are way ahead of the game if you can already see that people in his line of work have marriage issues. Maybe the issue is morale in his company, not the field in general, so perhaps a new department would be a better fit. GL!
While I think the "any little thing" comment is just stupid, I think the rest of his comment has value. If you spend your time commisserating with someone that only sees the cracks in the vase, you become more concious of the cracks in the vase too. I had to remove myself from the TIP & ML boards because I felt like the negativity on those boards was starting to catch like a bad cold.
I'll add that in my experience, men tend to group a lot of things into "any little things". You get upset b/c you had to fold a load of laundry - and to YOU, it's the 14th time he's left crap in the washer for you to finish even though you both do your own laundry. To HIM - he left that one load of laundry. There's a kind of blind spot to the fact that it's the 14th time.
I once read a story about a woman who divorced her H over him throwing his keys on top of the washer when he came home. It's a little thing - a VERY little thing. Except that she couldn't stand the sound and he did it every. single. day. And she had asked him repeatedly over many YEARS to not do that and had tried many different ways to get him to stop doing that - but still he did it. And one day she decided that she never wanted to hear that sound ever again. To him - he got divorced over any little thing - a single stupid thing. To her, he had been really inconsiderate and disregarded her feelings about something that irritated her for years - something really simple and completely within his ability to control. And that's why she got divorced - because he was inconsiderate and had no concern for her feelings.
No, 20% got divorced in the past 16 months.
We're estimating the overall divorce rate at closer to 70-80%, but it's hard to tell because a lot of them are remarried. Some of them for the 3rd or 4th time.
Your co-worker is a dumbarse. That's like saying "Well it's not my wife that I don't trust, it's the guys she works with..." Yeah, because she doesn't have any choice over whether or not she gives in to another man's advances.
It's a job that's stressful on the wife too, maybe she gets tired of it or gets tired of his not being around and/or feels alone in the marriage/family so she starts to figure "well, I might as well be alone since I am already doing it all myself".
Maybe there needs to be a different support system put in place for the spouses/families?
I also feel like I need to point out that, while sleeping in the same place does create a unique variable for firefighters/EMS - that 1/3 of their lives figure isn't a big deal. Working with other people is part of most jobs. They can choose to eat alone if they want (& probably be seen as a jerk, but still, it's a choice). And if they choose to PLAY together, then that's another personal choice they're making. It's not a requirement. When I dated EMS for 8 years - we were on a 24/48 sched - that's a 48-hr work week.
I work a normal 8-5 M-F job. If you include getting ready for work and commuting home where my focus is still job-related, I'm away from my H for a minimum of 11 hours a day just for work. That's 55 hours. And I do extra hours working remotely from home. Yes, I get to kiss my H good morning/night - and not being able to do that would be hard - but time spent outside of work isn't that different between occupations. Most people who work a normal job spend 1/3 of their lives with their co-workers. While I admire what firefighters/EMS do, and their hours are hard, there are many jobs with much worse schedules. The average restaurant manager works 70+ hours per wk as a standard - and that's with variable schedules plus being on-call routinely.
It's what you do with the time you're not at work that makes or breaks your family. I would also be willing to venture that any health insurance program offers "mental health" benefits - which if you look into them usually include marriage counseling.
Actually, neither mine nor DH's health insurance includes marriange counselling in the mental health benefits. And both of our coverages are, in my experiences from any benefits I've had in the past, pretty darn good.
In fact, last summer when I was seeing a counselor, she informed me that if at any time DH chose to join me, insurance would no longer cover my visits. The way she phrased it, I got the impression it was more typical for insurance to not cover marital counselling than to cover it.