The military marriage distortion

In the private sector, your family status is a complete non-issue. While the question comes up when you're filling out your W-2 forms, employers aren't allowed to ask questions about your family during the interview process. If anything, a family can be seen as a distraction.[Source] The Army is quite different when it comes to your personal life.

First, it's gets all up in your business. As a single, junior enlisted soldier, you must have a meal card and live in the barracks, which is kind of like living in a college dormitory, but with fewer females around.

If you're married, there's the question of how much involvement they want in the Family Readiness Group. If you live on-post, a home visit from your commander can be expected. And if you're Korea as a command sponsored family, there's more -- your unit has to make sure they're ready for a non-combatant evacuation. There are all kinds of requirements.

Second, and this is the good news -- having a family means you make more money. Your Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) goes up, the Cost of Living Adjustment increases, and if you live on-post, you may even get a bigger house just for having a bigger family.

These benefits lead to some weird incentives. Notice the part that said *single* junior enlisted soldiers have to live in the barracks -- married junior enlisted personnel don't. They get family housing. And so you get situations like this (a Marine, yes, but the situation still applies). Though it doesn't happen in Korea quite as much, I have seen soldiers do the darnedest things to live off-post -- ill-advised marriages to ... uh... "sub-optimal" spouses being one of them. Surprisingly, I haven't yet seen a Chuck & Larry type incident, but I'm sure they're out there.

It also affects the ... uh ... single female demographics outside of military installations. First, there's the type of young ladies that are found around military bases, which -- just like the nature of young men's fancies -- has never changed.

But since 2003 there's been another type. As wages in the private sector have stagnated, military compensation has grown better by comparison, especially with all the deployments that took place. Soldiers coming back from deployment(s) to Iraq or Afghanistan were swimming in money they didn't know how to handle, and they were likely to deploy again.

This created powerful incentives to enterprising young people who understood marriage and property laws, and who had access to joint checking accounts.

The conclusions to those stories are often sad. While you'd decry an institution who'd repossess a deployed Soldier's house or stole their money, some soldiers have had this happen to them -- by their spouses.

Due In part to the strange incentives the military offers to the married.