Lost,
I could have been you years ago. I hope that 6 years from now you won't be me.
When I met my AH we fell madly in love, we were soulmates, could do anything together. I fell hard. And he told me he was a recovered alchoholic but that was in the past and he wasn't that person anymore. That I was his true soulmate and he would never hurt me, that he'd never had a true love with someone.
Noone could tell me then not to persue a future with him. I was convinced that I was strong enough to handle whatever came my way, that he loved me enough to help him make the right decisions. And for the first couple of years I think he really tried. I had a career, made a decent living and considered myself strong and independant. He was never very finacially stable, didn't work a steady job, had problems with authority that sent him from one job to another. There were red flags all over the place but I didn't see them then. I just knew I loved him with all my heart.
Then came marriage and kids and all the stresses of ordinary lives. He started drinking again, we broke up then reconciled and later came the pills and my descent into madness. I tried everything to stand by him and support him. To be the one person who was not going to turn my back on him. Tried reasoning, tried holding onto his meds, tried controlling him. Nothing worked. In the end it was I who was left sitting in the floor with a gun to my head. Totally broken, totally disillusioned and utterly lost. I finally went crawling into a alanon meeting & spent my whole first visit bawling. I kept going and slowly started to learn how to help myself. How to take the focus off of him and put it back on my kids and I.
I truly hope you don't go down the same path.
Let me ask you something, how much has his addiction already affected you? I see in your posts that theres alot of the focus on him already. I really hope things work out for you. I can see you are already setting boundries for yourself by letting him know what consequences will occur if he keeps using. Thats a positive step.
Please consider going to alanon or narcanon, like coffee said, the whole idea of a higher power is something that you can beleive in that is bigger than yourself. It doesn't have to be God, we have more than one atheist in our group. What you will learn is tools to use to help you take care of yourself. Beleive me please, if your going to persue this relationship educate yourself please so that if problems do occur later down the road you will have the knowledge and the tools to deal with it without losing your mind.
I know that you will choose whichever path you decide you want to take, some of us have been so deeply affected by addiction that the first thing we want to say when we meet newcomers like you is to run away!! We don't want other people to endure what we have had to. Thats natural. Please consider not moving in together, or getting married or having children until you know more about the disease of addiction and hopefully he will be clean and working a recovery. Just stopping pills is not enough, he will be an addict untill the day he dies. Sobriety will be a daily struggle but it can be done. Thats why he needs support from others that have been down that road and understand what he is going through and he can find that through programs like Narcotics Anoynmous or professional services.. He has to do it for himself, not for you, he has to really want it. Love is not enough, if love could keep him sober none of us would be here.
I hope that 6 years from you aren't me, looking back over my 6 years of posts here and finally seeing things with clarity and feeling sad that things had to be the way they are. My AH is now without his wife & family. He has chosen pills over us. I pray thats not the ending you will face.
Keep coming back,
Teggie