War and partnership

Under modern martial-law conscription, as in Ukraine after February 2022, military-age men are typically not permitted to leave the country. Their wives and children can. Within weeks of mobilization, millions of marriages found themselves split across an international border — the wife and children in Poland, Germany, or further west; the husband in or near the front line. This is not a temporary separation. As of any given month of the war, no one knows when it ends. Couples have spent two, three, four years in this configuration. The connection is maintained through messaging apps with intermittent coverage, video calls when electricity permits, occasional visits when the husband can get short leave. The marriages that survive this configuration share certain features: regular communication patterns, explicit acknowledgment of the strain, refusal to pretend everything is normal.

Wars produce widows at scale. Young widows, often with small children, are a demographic feature of every major conflict. The widow at twenty-eight is in a structurally different position from the widow at seventy. She has decades ahead, possibly children to raise alone, and a marriage that was cut off before its arc completed. The pre-war marriage was almost certainly oriented toward shared future-building; the future no longer exists. Remarriage rates among young war widows vary enormously by culture, by religious framework, by economic necessity, and by the political handling of widowhood. Some societies provide robust state support and the widow can choose unhurriedly. Others provide none and remarriage is economic survival, which produces its own pattern of marital outcomes.

When a combatant comes home — wounded, traumatized, or simply changed — the marriage absorbs the cost. Research on US veterans, Soviet-era Afghan war veterans, IDF veterans, and others has consistently documented elevated rates of domestic violence, alcohol-related marital breakdown, and divorce in the years following return. The wife or husband who held the household together during deployment is not the same person who married the soldier, and the soldier is not the same person who left. The marriage cannot be the same and pretending it can is one of the most reliable ways to break it. Cynthia Enloe has argued, persuasively, that military institutions tend to externalize the cost of veteran reintegration onto the marriage, which absorbs it as a private problem rather than as the public consequence of policy it is.

For the spouse who fled while the partner stayed, life in the receiving country becomes a peculiar mix of safety and guilt. The spouse is materially safer but emotionally fractured. They are raising children alone in a foreign country whose language they may not speak, while watching news from the war and waiting for messages. Their workdays are structured by the staying partner's safety status. A few days of no communication can trigger acute crisis. The community of similarly displaced spouses, where it exists, becomes essential — these are the only people who fully understand the configuration. Diaspora networks of war-displaced spouses, in Poland, Germany, Canada, and elsewhere, have become important informal infrastructures of marital survival.

Some couples marry during the war. The wedding is often small, fast, conducted in city hall during a quiet morning, or in a basement during a shelling. The motivations vary: legal protection, the desire to commit before deployment, the desire to mark something joyous in the rubble. These weddings are not foolish or impulsive in the way peacetime fast weddings sometimes are. They are usually deeply considered acts performed in compressed time. Their survival rate is shaped less by the wedding itself than by the post-war conditions the marriage has to inhabit.

In many wars, sexual violence is used as a weapon. The marriages of survivors of wartime sexual violence — both women and men — carry the violence inside them. Disclosure to the spouse is psychologically necessary in most therapeutic models and culturally forbidden in many contexts. The marriage absorbs unspoken trauma that affects intimacy, parenting, and daily emotional regulation. Some couples find ways to support each other through this. Many do not, because the cultural script for disclosure does not exist and the trauma remains a private weight. This is one of the most underaddressed dimensions of war-marriage and one of the most predictive of post-war marital breakdown.

Children who grow up inside a wartime marriage develop a particular kind of vigilance. They are aware that one parent may not come home. They are aware that the relationship between their parents is conducted partly across a phone line. They become, often, secondary emotional caregivers to the parent who is more anxious. The marriage exists for them not as a stable background but as a structure they are actively monitoring. Sara Roy's work on Gazan children growing up under siege documents the long-term effects of this vigilance on attachment, including the children's own future marriages. The war reaches the next marriage before it begins.

When the war ends or pauses, the household has to re-equilibrate. The husband returns; the wife has been managing finances, decisions, parenting, and outside work for years; the prior division of labor is no longer applicable. Couples who renegotiate the division of labor explicitly fare better than couples who try to revert to pre-war patterns. The renegotiation is often painful and sometimes culturally fraught, because gender norms in the originating culture may not accommodate the new equilibrium that the war forced into being. Bosnian, Lebanese, and Sri Lankan post-conflict data all show similar patterns: the marriages that adapted to the new division held; the marriages that insisted on reversion did not.

Combatants return with disabilities, sometimes catastrophic. The spouse becomes, in addition to spouse, caregiver. The shift from partner to caregiver erodes some of the structures that hold romance — physical equality, mutual provision, sexual reciprocity. Disabled-veteran marriages have particular needs that few civilian support systems are designed for. The marriage can flourish, but it requires resources — respite care, mental health support, peer networks of similarly situated spouses — that are usually allocated to the veteran and not to the marriage as a unit. Cynthia Enloe's analysis applies again: the marriage absorbs the externalized cost of military policy.

How a receiving country handles war-displaced spouses determines a great deal of how the marriages fare. Poland in 2022 mobilized housing, employment, and education for arriving Ukrainian spouses and children at a scale that genuinely supported marriages across the border. Germany, the UK, and Canada offered different mixes. Receiving countries that processed the displaced spouse rapidly and allowed work authorization quickly reduced household financial strain and freed energy for marriage maintenance. Receiving countries that left displaced spouses in long bureaucratic limbo with no work authorization compounded the marital strain. The variation across receiving countries is itself a quasi-experiment in war-marriage support.

After major wars, societies have repeatedly assumed that with the war's end, marriages would recover. The data, across multiple post-war periods, suggests otherwise. Divorce rates spike in the years immediately following major conflicts in many countries. The peace dividend, materially, is real. The marital dividend is not automatic. Couples need structured support — not just material reconstruction but reconstruction of the relational fabric the war damaged. Post-war reconstruction budgets rarely allocate to this. The marriages absorb the gap.

The marriage that survives war is a marriage that has done slow, deliberate, often unglamorous work: explicit conversations about what each partner went through, mutual acknowledgment of what each lost, deliberate construction of a new shared identity that includes the war rather than pretending it didn't happen. This is Law Five at its hardest — revising the premise of the marriage in the face of trauma that resists narrative. The couples who do this work, in whatever cultural form is available to them — therapy where available, religious counsel where appropriate, conversation with peers — are the couples who continue. The collective task of any society emerging from war is to make this work supported, possible, and normal, rather than leaving it as a private struggle that some couples can afford and others cannot. The marriages that broke after the war broke partly because no one helped them do this work. That is fixable. It has not, anywhere, been fixed at scale.

Brinig, Margaret F. Family, Law, and Community: Supporting the Covenant. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010.

Cahn, Naomi, and June Carbone. Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.

Enloe, Cynthia. Bananas, Beaches and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.

Enloe, Cynthia. Globalization and Militarism: Feminists Make the Link. 2nd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016.

Enloe, Cynthia. Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women's Lives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.

Enloe, Cynthia. The Big Push: Exposing and Challenging the Persistence of Patriarchy. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2017.

Korac, Maja. Remaking Home: Reconstructing Life, Place and Identity in Rome and Amsterdam. New York: Berghahn Books, 2009.

Lieberman, Susan A. New Traditions: Redefining Celebrations for Today's Family. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1991.

Roy, Sara. The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-development. 3rd ed. Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 2016.

Roy, Sara. Unsilencing Gaza: Reflections on Resistance. London: Pluto Press, 2021.

Shah, Sonia. The Next Great Migration: The Beauty and Terror of Life on the Move. New York: Bloomsbury, 2020.

Sokołowska, Joanna. "Border Reception and the Politics of Welcome: Polish Responses to Ukrainian Displacement." East European Politics and Societies 37, no. 2 (2023): 489-510.