You asked if there are women who enjoy being with men like this. And you also wonder how you could have become so lost from yourself in the relationship and stayed in it.
I don't think there are women who enjoy men like this, other than women who have severe personality disorders who are unable to function normally in any area of life and for whom chaos is the norm.
You said he was wonderful and loving when sober: THAT is what keeps a woman in the relationship.
And the swings. The mood swings. The personality swings. The swings from drunk to sober. The swings from manic to depressive. The swings from endearing to brutalizing. The swings from abandoning to embracing. The swings from violent rage to soft steady tears.
Those swings never happen in exactly the same way. They never happen with the same triggers or the same time of day or night. And often the bad is so bad, it is so explosive and horrible, that afterwards--after all the crying and pleading and forgiveness and love-making that follows-- the spouse thinks that such an event could never ever possibly happen again, it was so explosive and horrible, surely that was the worst and it's behind them now, and cleaning up the wreckage has even catapulted them into a new fresh start and deepened their connection beyond what they could ever have imagined.
And it is true: that same explosive and horrible event never happens again in exactly the same way or on the same day or with the same trigger.
Something UNBELIEVABLE happens instead. And the two survive it, they clean up the wreckage, cry and forgive and make love and feel ever more committed now that that horror is behind them, and....then....when the spouse least expects it.....
Something UNBELIEVABLE happens.
This was the pattern of Lois Wilson and her husband, Bill W., who founded Alcoholics Anonymous. If you read their story, the decades of one unbelievable explosive crisis after another in their marriage, surely the last, but it never was, not for decades.....you will forgive yourself for hanging on. Lois hung on, too. Because she thought surely he was done. And he wasn't. The unbelievable was just around the corner.
But Bill W., by God's grace, had a psychic conversion, a complete spiritual tsunami, which changed him forever-- and he never drank again.
Had he continued drinking, they both would likely have simply died, terrible deaths. Too young. Broken by the unbelievable.
Be kind to yourself. And seek safe sober people.