Where I'm at
Reading all the heartbreak here has been such an eye opener for me. There is a common thread in all our lives that seems to have brought us to this place. The stories here are all unique yet I feel them all to be somehow similar to my own. What needless suffering addiction causes.
To partners of people in the grip of addiction, many would call us "codependent" or "enablers" and yet we know that we did not wish this on ourselves and we consciously do not want this in our lives, or the lives of our children. Most of us didn't "sign up" for this when we set out on our journeys with our partners.
The hardest thing for me to accept is the ugly reality of my damaged relationship, and the part I play in perpetuating it. We've given each other the hardest possible time over the past 18 months, I've been reduced to a nervous wreck, she's become partly dysfunctional.
We can't communicate. We're both desperately lonely in the relationship, a loneliness that's so much worse than simply not having a partner. I've gone through a classic process of trying to control her drinking, negotiating with her, ranting at her, pleading with her, harranguing her, co-operating with her, yet she still insists the problem is not serious, that she knows what she's doing.
I've tried involving her family, only to discover that the true outsider here is me, that they will support her in her addiction, rightly or wrongly. I'm called judgemental by them, yet in turn they judge me to be callous and without sympathy to her plight. They have no idea what living with this is like. Friends with all good intentions trot out cliches to us yet I know there's no magic formula, no easy answers to this.
We've tried therapy. The strong and damning message I received from her in therapy was that she was not going to stop drinking, that she had no reason to stop. Those were her words to me. As each avenue is explored it turns into a dead end, and our map of possibilities becomes smaller and smaller.
I've finally arrived at a place where I realise that this pattern we're in can last 20 or 30 years, as described by many in their own experiences here. I do feel now that the sane thing, the healthy thing to do after 18 months of inhuman stress, is to leave the relationship, and with it my cherished notions of family, of growing old together, of companionship and friendship.
The daily drudgery of tiptoeing around each other's inability to deal with this has become too much for me. I'm sick of the drama, the real life soap opera that we're living. I try to imagine a simpler life, being able to deal with people on my own terms, not having to keep up the props required to deal with life as it is now.