Like TankerDirver said, you and your family are at the mercy of Uncle Sam. I'm retiring at the end of this month, and my wife & I have been married 17 yrs. It's been insanely hard at times. Each assignment has it's own challenges. My year in Korea without her or the boys was incredibly tough for her, as have been the repeated deployments over the last few years.

She was active duty when we met, and we had to make assignment decisions based on where we could be together, and initially had to wait about a year before she could get assigned to my first base. Then she got out and picked up a job as a civil servant. That worked out very well for a few assignments, since the AF always seemed to need her specialty wherever we went. Nursing, teaching, or vet tech tend to be very portable jobs. I know guys whose wives are lawyers or doctors, but it's quite hard for them to keep moving and changing their licenses, practices, etc. Whatever a spouse chooses to do, a major consideration has to be how easy is it going to be to pack it all up and move somewhere either "sparse" (I like that, TD), or even overseas. When the time comes to go to Okinawa for 3 years, will she be able to find something fullfilling to do with her time.

(Disclaimer: yes, all pronouns referring to spouses above are female. But the thoughts apply equally to male spouses of female military members. There's just so many fewer of the later.)