Those Dark Corners

How to deal with jealousy as a military husband.

by Thomas Litchford


I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to a certain uneasiness about the first time Danielle went to sea. Strange things can happen in far off places, when the rest of the world seems remote: the testosterone-heavy atmosphere of a Navy ship, the wilderness of a hunting camp, Las Vegas. She was thousands of miles away – literally on the other side of the world – on a ship with approximately nine men for every woman. My Ann Arbor roommates volleyed endless jokes about my then-fiancée and the sailors on the ship, but I was able to shrug them off without ever becoming truly jealous.

Until she got home.

That’s when I heard about the things she saw in Thailand (there’s a lot to see in Thailand), the impossibly cool Navy SEALs she met aboard ship and the persistent advances of a certain over-zealous ensign. It was suddenly clear that I would never see all the places she would see. She would meet men who had achieved some kind of masculine ideal that I could never even aspire to. And she would have to fend off the occasional upstart who thought he could take my place. It all hit me at once, and I guess the mix of anxiety, squeamishness and envy I felt is what you’d call Jealousy, with a capital “J.”

But it was also telling that she was even offering these stories to me. It meant she wasn’t going to lock me out. The old military maxim “what happens on deployment stays on deployment” didn’t apply. But that didn’t mean it wouldn’t take more work over the ensuing years to keep the poisonous creep of jealousy out of our marriage.

I wanted to know how other guys handled it, so I asked Army husband Al Santayana about his experiences. Al’s wife Michelle has been in the Army for 11 years. In the six years they’ve been married, she has deployed twice to Iraq for 15 months each time.

“I don't think I would be human if I didn't feel a little bit jealous sometimes,” Al said. But, he says, she makes their marriage a priority and “lets everyone know it.”

For his part, Al wanted to make sure his wife didn’t have anything to worry about back home. “I wanted her to feel I had full trust in her.”

Trust and communication are the keys to how Al and his wife handle jealousy. “You have to trust your wife in order for there to be any peace in your own head,” he said. Most of what’s really damaging about the “green-eyed monster” is self-inflicted. When you know nothing about what your wife is going through, your imagination fills in the blanks, often with the worst stuff it can cook up.

That’s why you have to talk about it – or at least listen. “Women tend to want to communicate more about what they do than guys. You, as a husband, have to be willing to listen. In her eyes, you listening and just being there is support for her,” Al said.

But listening to her will also help you. Knowing and understanding what she’s going through will put a searchlight on those dark corners that have been torturing you. Knowing that Danielle was able to fend off that sneaky ensign all those years ago gives me confidence that she’ll be able to handle the next one.

Finding confidence in the strength of our wives is really all we can hope for. Everything else is an act of faith. When our wives deploy, they enter into a man’s world, a world that those of us at home have no power over. We build up the foundation of our marriages with the time we have together, and we do the best we can. The effort we put into our marriages at home is what gives us the faith we need to say goodbye.