Washington

MY husband looks more like Cary Grant in “Operation Petticoat” every day — accomplished, senior and ravishingly handsome. Ordinarily, this would not be a problem for me. Ordinarily, this Cary Grantness would be cause for a skip in my step and a naughty gleam in my eye.

But this is not an ordinary week for military marriages. This is a week in which heroes are brought down by their all-too-human flaws. This is a week of women who look like Kardashians turning over their e-mail accounts to the F.B.I. This is a week of military spouses — male and female — being hand-fed humiliation by the person whose career ambitions they supported for years.

Most of the time, my long-married military friends and I don’t think about infidelity. We don’t worry about divorce. We know that research from the RAND Corporation shows that even though military members are more likely to be married at every age than their matched civilian counterparts, we are no more likely to be divorced. We feel confident that despite war and danger and the escapades of our own children, our marriages are forever.

Until now. Because Gen. David H. Petraeus is no drunken ship captain carousing in Russia with his junior officers. General Petraeus is no wolf preying on females in his chain of command. He seems too much like our own husbands. If he could betray his wife of 38 years and 23 moves and a decade of constant war, what hope do the rest of us have for fidelity?