So does she really have a problem with alcohol on any level? Or does anyone think that there's something else at work here that can be (more easily) fixed and the alcohol is just incidental?
I love her so much. I didn't know it was possible to love someone this much. She's a good person at heart, a good provider and awesome mom. I feel like it could be so much worse and that's the biggest argument against leaving her. It's not that I'm anxious to stick around and wait for things to get worse, but I'm just really wondering if she has an actual problem with alcohol, or if I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, or it's basic irreconcilable personality differences, or any number of other things. Just because this has happened before doesn't mean *we* can't deal with it, depending on the root cause. My wife and her ex didn't divorce because of her infidelity or alcoholism-they divorced because they had other problems and neither of them wanted or knew how to fix them.
And I all ready tried the "lowering my expectations" route. I told her if she didn't want to change things then I would just give her my blessing to go do what she wants so I could stop expecting or hoping for certain things. She didn't like that, said that she doesn't want her wife to tell her to "do whatever she wants". I told her that she was doing it anyway so I might as well stop hoping for her to be home on Friday nights and be pleasantly surprised when she does. She denied that she was doing whatever she wanted anyway. *sigh* Round and round and round.