Not a guy, but I'll welcome you anyway -- I remember talking with one of the Mikes a way back about the difference between being a man with an AW and a woman with an AH, and saying that... sometimes, it's probably harder for a man to leave because you guys are so raised and trained to take financial responsibility for your wife. Women, OTOH, are raised to take emotional responsibility for our husbands. So maybe it evens out somehow. Either way, neither one of us is really responsible for the choices of our mates, and there's not much we can do to control them, try as we may.
This may be as good a place as any to mention that I read about a study this week on women alcoholics: They had tested the seratonin levels (the feel-good hormone that prevents you from getting clinically depressed) and found that after four years of daily or almost daily alcohol consumption, women's seratonin levels had dropped by 40 percent. (For men, it took significantly longer to get to that level.)
I don't know how that plays into anything, but I was thinking that if alcohol affects women's seratonin levels differently than men's, maybe it affects other aspects of her brain function differently, too?
And I'm not trying to slide back into focusing on the alcoholics here -- but I've found that the more I learn about this disease, the more I can let go of the anger I've carried towards my AXH, and the more I can develop a compassionate attitude, in spite of it all.