To be honest at sea you didn't have time for too much goings on. In my job a typical work day was about 18 to sometimes 20 hours at sea. 20 hours was usually every other day. My shop had about 12-15 guys in it. Of them usually all but one or two were like brothers. I still keep in contact with a few of them almost 35 years later. Several at the time were married had kids etc.
A ship at sea doesn't stay at sea six full months during deployment LOL. We hit port for a week or so at least once a month and that was in The Med Sea. Often enough when you hit port usually about 3-4 guys would go on liberty. Safety in numbers was one reason and the guys were like your family was the other. Some hit the bars, some hit the historical places, some hit the beaches etc. Of the 5000on ship only about a handful hitting the bars caused trouble and were dealt with accordingly. I've dealt with many a drunken sailor and did my own share of drinking.
On a typical six month deployment typically you would see at least two of such in a 4 year hitch tensions individually could run high about mid deployment. Lot's of variables including family break ups after you left, stress of the hours and repetitive days, or whatever reason. It even hit the lifers many times. You learned fast to understand to simply stay out of someone's face and off their nerves for a day or two. It passed it was just typical deployment stress.
The six month deployments IMO wasn't the roughest time at sea. GITMO pre-deployment work ups were where you underwent a month long ship wide training exercise including critical readiness evaluations and test individually, department wise, and ship wise. An hours sleep some nights was all you got. Six hours plus at Battle Stations meaning confided to work space unable to even drink water wasn't ideal especially down in The Hole.
Of my three years and nine months onboard I spent roughly two years actually underway at sea. My last year I didn't go to sea except three days because we went into drydock for overhaul. Working hours there were 12- 16 hour days thanks to pending deployment to the PG during the 1979-80 Iranian Crisis.
I was a sailor and later a soldier for a year stint in the guards as a 13-B Cannon Infantry weekend warrior. I hauled the ammo for the 155's. I'll take the Navy anytime :>}
I was in the Navy for 6 years. One man I knew, an ex-Navy linguist who had served in the Indian Ocean during the late 1970s, related how he had 3 of those 6-month deployments in a row. By the time he finally was able to leave the IO and go home to visit his wife in San Francisco, she was in the process of divorcing him.
He was a rarity in the Navy - he could read, write, and speak Farsi (Persian), three dialects of Arabic, German, Italian, Greek, French, and Spanish. He was honorably discharged in 1981 and never re-upped. It was his poor luck that the Shah of Iran was thrown out and the US Embassy seized by radicals during his enlistment.