Aviation Induced Divorce Syndrome

A lot of people you meet will wonder why, when they almost knock you out with excitement at hearing you are married to a pilot, your response is to mumble a barely audible & very unenthusiastic 'yes, fantastic'. The fact is that 99% of people truly do not understand the difficulties that come with trying to maintain a healthy relationship/family life when working in aviation, and explanations fall on deaf ears.

Marriages in aviation seem to be so difficult to maintain that even the community itself has coined a term for them failing - 'Aviation Induced Divorced Syndrome - AIDS'. Marriages are hard enough to maintain under 'normal' circumstances, let alone when you throw something like aviation into the mix. There are an enormous of pilot wife (and pilot, cabin crew) blogs on the internet covering the subject of how one can actually keep a relationship/family going. There are some who have jumped on the 'co-pilot' wagon with relative ease and others saying they would never again choose to go through it.

I think for a large number of the population they can only relate a pilots work and travel to the annual boys weekend, or company function their husband goes on for a week of the year. So they imagine a few days of heavenly relaxation on their own, followed by missing their partner for a couple more days, nearly dying of boredom, panicking their partner may be cheating on them (this doesn't apply to all - the cheating or the panicking) and then their partner being home and life carrying on as normal.

This is pretty different to life when you partner travels for extended period of times (4-12wks away, 2-4 weeks home - or any rotating schedule). In short - these types of relationships can most likely only be understood by the average person as being similar to dating-breaking up-dating-breaking up (repeat for the duration of your life married to a pilot).
When your partner is home you spend the first week getting used to living with someone again and the last week dreading their departure. The in-between is wonderful yet exhausting: trying to balance family time, friend time, and quality time together, whilst also getting anything else done that requires the two of you (or just your husband). In some instances there may be required to be reminders of where house hold items are stored if like in my instance, your partner has only been home once in 10 months. Once they leave, you have the choice to mope around miserably for the duration of their tour (in which case you are likely going to become parts of the AIDS statistics), or pick yourself and be more fiercely independent than most single women....whilst not actually being single. When your partner returns home, repeat the above exercise whilst loving your pilot and not becoming a contributor to the AIDS statistics ;)