Alcoholic Partners & Sex
This is an excerpt from The Dilemma of the Alcoholic Marriage C 1971
pp 48-52.
I think we might often get a clearer picture of the trouble if we gave more consideration to the original reasons for the marriage, and how the basic personalities of the partners react to one another. For example, one known characteristic of the alcoholic is dependency. He tends to look for a mothering wife, someone he can lean on. When he finds a woman he wants to marry, it is therefore one who has a strongly developed mother instinct, and who, in turn, wants a man to baby and protect.
It might seem that two such people would actually complement each other and so make an ideal marriage, since each would provide what the other one needs. But a mother-child relationship is, to begin with, an unsound basis for an adult marriage. Apart from the alcoholism, they’re already headed for trouble.
Then when the alcoholism accentuates the drinker’s dependency, and the burden becomes too much for the wife, she takes refuge in self-pity and resentment.
Her attitude toward him, unconscious through it may be, is not geared to transforming him into a man of responsibility. His attitude toward her, as his drinking becomes more and more compulsive, is an unconscious disappointment that ‘mama’ has failed him by expecting him to be grown up.
When such a man finds sobriety in AA and really takes hold of the Twelve Step program, it is bound to create changes in their marriage relationship that neither one is prepared for. He becomes determined to grow up, to assume his responsibilities, to make his sobriety count in terms of adult living. He wants to overcome his dependency, leave the ‘mama’ business behind him. But this wish cannot, of itself, change his wife’s attitude or behavior, and the rift between them grows wider. They can never return to the early phases of their marriage, for he no longer wants to lean on her.
Since his wife has been to him, from the beginning, a mother figure, he may also have deeply rooted feelings about his marital relations with her, and this would tend to make him shy away from her as a marriage partner.
I am not saying that any of this is clearly realized by the people involved in such a situation, but it is there and it can operate to change their relationship into something that neither of them finds tolerable.
Another way of trying to visualize this difficulty is to realize that the alcoholic is basically insecure and therefore seeks a partner who is stronger. Call it a mother figure, a father figure or a god figure, he will, in his mind, build it up to what his need demands and carefully protect this image from anything that might expose its weakness or reduce its importance in his mind.
I have known many men alcoholics who were so rugged and masculine that no one would ever imagine their being dependent, especially on a woman. They might complain about their wives in superficial ways – ‘she’s a lousy cook, a shiftless housekeeper, does nothing but go to the movies and play cards’- but such complaints are offered only as an excuse for drinking and so are meaningless. They never speak of their wives as being weak, helpless, or stupid. This they would never do, because they’d be destroying the bulwark of protection their wives represent to them, their shield against a menacing world.