Military couples have a number of distinctive strengths and challenges that are likely to influence their relationship adjustment. Military couples' strengths include stable employment, financial security, and subsidized health and counseling services. At the same time, military couples often experience long periods of separation and associated difficulties with emotional disconnect, trauma symptoms, and reintegrating the family. This paper describes best practice recommendations for working with military couples, including: addressing the distinctive challenges of the military lifestyle, ensuring program delivery is seen as relevant by military couples, and providing relationship education in formats that enhance the accessibility of programs.

Trauma symptoms are negatively correlated with couple relationship satisfaction, which is of particular importance in the relationships of military personnel who are often exposed to trauma whilst on overseas deployment. This study tested a model in which communication mediated an association between trauma symptoms and low relationship satisfaction. Thirty-one Australian military couples were observationally assessed during a communication task, and assessed on their relationship satisfaction and individual functioning. As expected, trauma symptoms in the male military spouse were associated with low satisfaction in both spouses. Females' low positive communication fully mediated the relationship between males' trauma symptoms and low female satisfaction, but not male relationship satisfaction. Unexpectedly, males' negative communication behaviors were associated with high male relationship satisfaction, and partially mediated the association between trauma symptoms and male satisfaction. Discussion focused on how some communication usually thought of as negative might be associated with relationship satisfaction in military couples.

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Military couple relationships have a number of risk and protective factors that set them apart from civilian couples. Financial and job security, subsidised housing and healthcare, and cost-free support services provide advantages to military couples. On the other hand, frequent relocations, separations, and deployments are associated with social and employment difficulties for spouses, emotional disconnection, trauma-related health problems, and relationship distress. These factors give military couples a distinctive risk and resiliency profile that might make them ideal candidates for relationship education (RE). RE programs need to be tailored to address the special needs of military couples, to ensure content is seen as relevant, and delivered in a format that increases access and flexibility within the unpredictable military lifestyle. This dissertation makes the case for military RE, presenting best practice recommendations for tailoring interventions for use with this special population. Cross-sectional research was conducted to investigate the role of communication and dyadic coping in military couple relationships, to test key assumptions that underpin the design and content of military RE. Communication was found to partially mediate the association between trauma symptoms and relationship satisfaction, with findings suggesting that communication normally considered negative might be adaptive in some couples. Common dyadic coping, in which couples work together to develop strategies to cope with stress, was found to be associated with relationship satisfaction. The implications of these findings for military RE are discussed. A military-specific adaptation of the Couple CARE program, Couple CARE in Uniform, was developed and tested by randomised controlled trial with a sample of 32 Australian military couples, against a self-directed reading control. Couples saw reliable improvement in relationship satisfaction and communication, however no difference was found between the two conditions.