I'd agree with newhope - you seem to be attempting to correlate these issues of your arguments with drinking ( or not drinking ). These are simply life issues - marital issues in your case. Every single one of us has some kind of issues that were neglected while we were drinking - marital, work related, psychological, etc...
Our coping mechanism to work out these issues while we were drinking was to simply not cope with them at all, and basically just get drunk and hope they went away. Well, what you are finding is what we all did - they don't go away. And we need to deal with them. Discussion is a good thing in a marriage or any relationship...hopefully you can have an honest discussion with your wife. Don't rule out counseling either if you can't figure it out on your own.