Haydenc

Hello all, I just found this website forum/ today and was hoping for support. My story feels long and complicated but I’m going to try to cut it down to the important details. To start, I grew up with an alcoholic mother. I’m 24 years old and for the
entirety of my life she’s struggled with alcohol. It affected my entire childhood and life and completely shaped me, and I’m not close at all with my mom. Still learning how to navigate that relationship.

I’ve been with my boyfriend (31) for six months, and broke up with him yesterday. When we met he told me that he had previously struggled with alcohol and drugs but made it seem like it was way in the past. The night we met he had been drinking, and for the first couple months of our relationship he had a drink or two when we went out. I didn’t think it was a problem but he obviously wasn’t sober at that point, but told me he had been sober for six months with the
exception of the night we met but he didn’t consider that to have broken the streak. About two months in is when I also found out he was living in a sober living home. not from him telling me, but from me finding literature in the house. Around that time, he got blackout drunk and I had to drive around the city looking for him. It terrified me. I told him the next day that if it happened again I couldn’t be with him and I told him about my mom and the reason it bothered me so much.

We moved in together after three months of dating because his sober living home was in a different city, and we wanted to be closer together (I know, way too soon). Since then, there were two other instances of me finding out that he had been drinking and hid it from me. After one of those I told him I wanted him to move into another sober living house, and to start going to AA. He said ok. We started making plans for him to move into sober living, but the AA was never mentioned again (neither by myself or him. I should’ve brought it up again.)

From then until last week, everything seemed fine. He works as a bartender and there were often times that he would come home and didn’t seem normal to me and I wondered if he had been drinking, but I thought maybe he was just tired or something. I still don’t know for sure, but had suspicions pretty regularly. Last week we were on vacation and I found him with a half drank bottle of tequila. The next day at dinner I watched him go to the bar and order a drink after he told me he was going to the bathroom. When
he came back he intensely denied it and said “I swear on our relationship I didn’t get a drink.” Spoiler: he later admitted that he did, which I already knew because I saw it with my own eyes.

Him blatantly lying to me like that bothered me so deeply. When we got back from our trip two days ago we talked and I told him how much it upset me and that he had to go to AA and something had to change, and that if he kept being dishonest I couldn’t be in the relationship. Later that day he went to work and I decided to tell his mom that he drank on our trip. In my conversation with her, I learned that he has been to rehab 13 times previously, and according to her, alcohol is the least of his issues and that he’s had a long battle with opioid addiction. She said she had to kick him out of her house and said it was a “final and desperate decision”. The way she spoke terrified me (note that she’s not crazy- she’s an amazing loving mom and it’s clear that he drove her to a point of madness). I realized that if he’s already been to rehab 13 times, I don’t trust that this will be the time he gets better. I also realized I don’t trust him in general for not telling me any of that. His mom was shocked he hadn’t
told me, and said she asked him point blank if I knew about all of his past and he told her yes. She told me she doesn’t want to be involved in this at all and asked that I not let him know that we talked.

yesterday I couldn’t hide my feelings anymore and he realized I wanted to break up. He’s since said things like I must have never loved him, I’m giving up on the relationship, if I actually loved him I would be there for him and fight for the relationship and stay with him while he tried to get sober. He says I’m making it way too big of a deal because it’s not like he’s getting drunk every night, it’s only happened 5 times so far in our relationship. He swears he’s not dishonest about anything else and that it’s only about the alcohol and it’s because he hates that side of himself. He says that if we solve the addiction issue, the lying will stop. He says it’s so unfair for me to not give me this chance to get better. He said it’s unfair and a cop out for me to use my mom as an “excuse”. Since I couldn’t tell him that his mom told me about the 13 times in rehab, I asked him if he’d ever been and he said yes. I asked when and he said when he was 24, and that it was for pills and he hasn’t done them since. He said nothing about the 12 other times.

He was my first serious relationship and I didn’t know it was possible for someone to love me as much as he did. He did so many amazing things for me. I feel so happy and safe with him. I’m worried I made a mistake because he’s right, it’s not like he’s getting drunk every night, it’s only happened a few times. He says we haven’t actually had a plan for him to get sober yet and that he hasn’t done anything on his own because “it hasn’t been a problem in our relationship” but now that he knows it’s such an issue he’s going to change and stop. I’m on a roller coaster back and forth of thinking I should’ve given him that chance, and knowing that this was the right decision because I truly don’t trust him and don’t know how I would get that trust back. People have said that it’s way too soon in our relationship for me to put up with this, but we had already talked about marriage. He was saving up for a ring. I think I got caught up in his excitement and him wanting to move so fast was related to his addiction in a way. Either way, we both saw this as our forever so to me it’s not as simple as being early enough in the relationship that i had no stake in the game and needed to leave him to figure it out for himself.

im sorry for the extra long post. I suppose I’m just looking for assurance that I made the right decision. He’s so good at manipulating and convincing me of things. I just keep going back to the thought that I’ve already struggled with a relationship with an alcoholic for 24 years, so why would I willingly enter into a relationship with another? But what if he does change for me and get better? This is hard. I truly appreciate any help y’all can offer.