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

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.