BETHESDA, Md., Jan. 27, 2011 – In the list of problems that can confront service members after a combat deployment, few can be harder to talk about or more devastating than the inability to resume intimate relationships.
Couples who have survived multiple combat deployments know the situation all too well.
“The first few years of the war, everybody thought they’d get off the plane and the honeymoon would start,” Rebekah Sanderlin, an Army wife at Fort Bragg, N.C., and “Operation Marriage” blogger, told American Forces Press Service. “The first two weeks are good, then it’s downhill for several months.
“We had a hard time just feeling like we knew each other,” Sanderlin said of her husband, who has deployed several times. “It was like there was a stranger in the house. Even if we were physically intimate, we really didn’t feel connected.”
The Sanderlins are far from alone. “I haven’t met anybody who just bounces right back,” she said of redeployed couples.
By Lisa Daniel
Defense.gov News Article: Center Provides Advice on Post-deployment Intimacy Issues
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