Rank, Wives and Friendship: Can They Mix?

Officer and enlisted wives speak on the subject.

by Tanya Biank

Making friends is hard enough

Some wives have close officer/enlisted friendships.  When Sarah Walter’s husband was a second lieutenant, she became best friends with a specialist’s wife.  The two women met at a mandatory recycling class on post and discovered they shared similar interests such as knitting and quilting.  Both enjoyed talking about politics and current events, and shared many viewpoints and values.

“I’ve found that it’s hard enough to make lasting friendships in this world, and limiting your options to a certain rank, immediately halving your chances of finding happiness, seems absurd,” says Sarah, whose husband is now a captain.  She’s learned a lot from her enlisted friends, and vice versa. “I think too often people assume they know how other ranks live, when in fact they don’t know much about the differences at all.”

Their jobs do not define us

Bethany Freeman, an enlisted Air Force wife, learned a life lesson while on a flight headed to her hometown in Georgia.  She struck up a conversation with a woman across the aisle and found they were from the same base.  “After talking about pretty much everything under the sun, I discovered that she was the wife of the second or third highest-ranking man on the base,” Bethany says.  It scared her for a minute.  “Then I remembered that I had been talking to her for an hour already, and she was just a person, a wonderful human being who chatted with a young mother on a long flight, then carried my diaper bag for me while I carried my sleeping son until we made it to baggage claim and both found our families.  That cemented in my mind the realization that we are all just humans.  Our husbands have jobs, with different responsibilities, different ranks, different perspectives and different personalities.”

“We are wives, [our husbands’] support,” Bethany says.  “We are tied to their jobs by our love for them.  But also we are women, we are independent, and, in the end, their jobs do not define us.”