“To Be So Connected, Yet Not At All”: Relational Presence, Absence, and Maintenance in the Context of a Wartime Deployment

Abstract

Abstract During a wartime deployment, there is variability in relational partners' physical and/or psychological presence as they prepare for, or recover from, the separation. This variability may influence how relational partners communicate to sustain the relationship. In this article, we explore the relationship maintenance strategies that 50 Army wives experienced during a wartime deployment. Our data suggest military wives use a variety of maintenance strategies to keep their marriages at a desired level throughout a deployment process, some of which occur prior to deployment whereas other strategies happen after the reunion. We also identified four maintenance paradoxes that occurred when certain maintenance strategies appeared to be associated with unintended consequences. We examine the maintenance strategies and paradoxes through the frames of social presence theory and ambiguous loss to better understand the maintenance of military marriages during wartime in regard to different levels of physical and psychological presence. Taken together, this study suggests Army wives utilize a variety of relationship maintenance strategies, but the difficult circumstances of a wartime deployment may influence the enactment of the strategies and their potential outcomes at both an individual and relational level. Keywords: Ambiguous LossMilitary MarriagesParadoxRelationship MaintenanceSocial PresenceWartime Deployment Acknowledgments This research was supported by a grant from the Center for the Study of Long Distance Relationships and JF Milne Publishing. The authors would like to thank Lindsay Timmerman, Carolyn Kane, Elham Sliman, Lynn Hartshorn, and Heidi Nicholls for their assistance with this project. Notes Note. Category names in italics are additions or adjustments to Merolla's (Citation2010a) typology. Additional informationNotes on contributorsKatheryn C. Maguire Katheryn C. Maguire (PhD, University of Texas) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Wayne State University where Daria Heinemann-LaFave is a doctoral student. Erin Sahlstein Erin Sahlstein (PhD, University of Iowa) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.