Love After War: Saving Love, Saving Lives

Injured veterans and their romantic partners winning the battle for love.

2021

57 mins

Love After War delves deep into the intimate lives of injured veterans and their romantic partners. It is a story of coming home and sexual healing. The accounts illustrate how each faces the challenges of disability and musters up the courage beyond what was needed for war to restore connection.

I applaud the filmmakers for shedding light on this sensitive, yet highly relevant, subject. This film highlights the hope that lies beyond the visible and invisible wounds of war.

Lt. Gen. (Ret.) Mike Linnington

CEO, Wounded Warrior Project

Synopsis

Love After War: Saving Love, Saving Lives is a story of injured veterans, true love, physical and emotional pain, coming home, and sexual healing. This feature-length documentary tells the stories of five couples in which at least one of the partners has sustained an injury during active duty. In four of our couples, one partner has suffered catastrophic, combat-related injuries. For one of the couples, both partners have suffered injuries in the military. Two of the veterans were young and single when they sustained their injuries; two were partnered and married each other; two were married (one of those were newlyweds). In each case, these young men and women volunteered to defend their country and came home to realize their physical and psychological trauma has affected their intimate lives.

The documentary delves deep into their emotional and physical intimate lives and the journey from being sexually devastated to happily in love in-the-face-of their physical and psychological wounds. The stories are painful, but viewers will witness how they are winning their personal battles for love. Each couple expresses their hope that their story will help future wounded warriors. These couples have exhibited sexual resiliency in the face of grievous combat-related injuries on their journey to restoring emotional openness and physical closeness.

Reviews

LOVE AFTER WAR takes a hard topic that people don't like to talk about and normalizes it.

Lee Woodruff

Author of In an Instant: A Family's Journey of Love and Healing

Director Commentary

Based on my experience as a sexologist with a disability specializing in sexuality and disability, I was invited to present at the Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes 2006 Road to Recovery Conference and Tribute for wounded Veterans and their families. At the time the headlines read that failed intimate relationships were the leading cause of suicide in the military. Also, a major research report on marriage in the military concluded that service members who return from deployment with a serious mental or physical disability experience more marital stress and divorce than their non-disabled peers. After presenting at just one conference, I was hooked on working with injured Veterans. Participants were hungry for knowledge and support as no one had addressed intimacy issues in their rehabilitation. Then in 2009 I was invited to submit a chapter to an anthology, Hidden Battles on Unseen Fronts: Stories of American Soldiers with Traumatic Brain Injuries and PTSD. I was thinking of calling it Making Love After Making War. I asked the editors to share all the soldiers’ stories with me so I would have a solid basis for my chapter. Unfortunately, there were no stories that had relationships with happy endings. I ended up writing a chapter titled The Battle for Love. However, I had met Veteran couples over the years who have restored emotional closeness and physical intimacy despite significant physical and psychological challenges. I thought it was important to share their stories to offer realistic hope to the hundreds-of-thousands of single and partnered veterans with PTSD, traumatic brain injury, and other catastrophic injuries who are still fighting the battle for love. My intention for making Love After War is also for the film to provide a voice bringing a vital issue into the national conversation, to serve as an educational tool for medical providers, and, through a companion website, be the nucleus of a community for those in need of help.