Kimmi-
I don't know if this applies for you or not but your post brought this up for me.
I spent a lot of energy trying to figure out the "why" of this disease for my loved one. Some of this was for me, as I was trying to figure out if any of this was caused by me somehow and "what" I could do to try and make my loved ones life "okay" so he would not want to drink again.
Some was confusion. My ex that got me here was a binge drinker. So most of the time his daily consumption of alcohol was okay. Two to four times a year though I had to watch out because it was going to be bad. Problem was I never knew when those times were. I was under the false belief that if I took all the stress out of his life he would not desire to drink.
I don't know if my ex was an alcoholic or not. He was a problem drinker, and his drinking impacted me negatively for a long time. I started to feel better when I started using that as my barameter, not what he said about alcohol his use etc. He was telling me the best truths that he could, but they were truths shrouded by him trying to continue to convince me and himself it was all okay.
His relationship with alcohol was about his disease.
My relationship with trying to make it okay and perfect was about my disease. I thought if I could just put all the pieces together we would be happy and perfect.