EnnuiStasis

Before getting involved or emotionally invested with your husband, wife, GF or BF, did you already know they had an alcohol problem?

If not, does your 20/20 hindsight see now that there were issues you didn't see then?

In the big picture I guess it doesn't really matter... but I'm curious what other people's experience was ~ if you got involved with someone with an addiction with full awareness or if it just crept into your life, or popped out as a surprise.

ave

I knew. I met him in AA, actually... For most of our relationship, I felt like we both were working strong programs. There were a lot of good things going on for us then. Looking back, it seems so silly that I would be so blindsided when he started relapsing. There were little signs in the months leading up to it... but I really didn't think it would happen. Even if I did, I couldn't have stopped it.

PeacefulMe

I knew but never having been involved with alcoholism either in my family or former relationships had no clue how it would affect a relationship long term. Also with no Internet in the late 80s not so easy to get information and no forums such as SR to open ones eyes. We were married 21 years and in process of divorce when he died in November of complications of his disease. If I knew back in the late 80s what I know now I would never have married him.

LexieCat

I definitely knew in both cases.

Of course, knowing someone has a drinking problem is a far cry from having a clear picture of exactly where it is headed. I had been through the "alcoholism/recovery" drill with my first husband, which I think made me unrealistically optimistic that my second husband would grab onto recovery the same way if things ever got out of hand. They did get out of hand, he made some tentative efforts but ultimately never got it.

lovesunandsnow

For me my ex-abf covered up his drinking pretty good. We both worked for a major company and that is how we meet. I was taken away by his attention on me and our fun times out. I have to say we did drink together but for me I stop after a few he did not but I just was not paying attention. Now that I look back I should have, I did have red flags but the way I felt with him over took watching him drink.

I’d never been with anyone that was an alcoholic and believed him when I did question him and got a half-truth answer, my gut knew it was a lie but I ignored it. That should have been where I left him, and I wish I did. The more involved emotionally I got the more the circle of lies, and manipulation came about. I just couldn't see it, I felt stuck until my mom got sick and I left for two weeks to care for her, I saw the real person he was. My blinders were off and my gut that was telling me to run showed me why.

He would call me at night like 1am or 2am after drinking a ton saying come home or I’ll never speak to you again. Tell me he was going to leave my dog and move out, knowing I was 3000 miles away from the apartment and didn't know anyone in that area to help me. I was so crushed to see this side of him, but in the next breath I was told how amazing of a person I am and that he loved me more than anything in life. Here I was already dealing with my Mom nearly dying and then to deal with my home falling apart it took a lot out of me.

20/20 hindsight is I wish I would have never moved in with him but I did and because of that time that I am now 8 months away from him, I would venture to say I’m a better person. I’m still hurting and miss him the person I thought he was. It was a dream that was really a lie and I hate it when I miss him. I’m human so I will forgive myself and move onto a better life without an alcoholic in it. I guess 1.5 years together is better than a lifetime of pain and lies but it has marked me for life of what I do not ever want to get back into. I feel sorry for him, being an alcoholic that will not get help must be living a life of hell. I wish him the best and anyone else dealing with a life altering crippling disease that I cannot understand.

LifeRecovery

I heard a lot of stories about how his drinking had improved from when he was younger. I did not see any alcoholic tendancies the first year we were together. The second year there were some red flags, but because there had not been any the previous year I passed them off as the abnormal.....he started a new job, we moved in together, he moved etc. However getting hammered the night before your job interview, and other inappropriate binge drinking behaviors were present.

I did not grow up with alcohol use, but I did grow up very codependent for other reasons, looking back I did a lot of tucking away of what I did not want to see that second year.

For me the shock of the drinking really hit after we got married (just at the two year mark of our relationship). Within weeks I realized the signs I had been missing previously. I still did a lot of denial, but the reasons slightly changed. I could admit there was a problem, but that I was married so I just needed to "deal with it" and I threw myself into my own recovery feeling somehow I was at fault (not for his drinking, but for him not wanting recovery).

wellnowwhat

I had no clue.

I am not from an alcoholic family, but I had a close childhood friend who was an alcoholic, and she came from an alcoholic family. It overtook her so fast and was devastating. Fortunately, she found recovery early and was already committed to a sober life when I started dating my AH.

When we were discussing our future, I told my AH at one point "I think I am pretty strong and can handle anything. Just don't become an alcoholic, I don't think I can handle that."

Unfortunately, I was very right.

Also, unfortunately, I was talking to someone who may have had an awareness that he was already caught up in the disease.

Three children and a cross-country move later I started to have the notion that I was living with an alcoholic. He hid his behaviour well and it would be several years before I was sure. He is still a daily drinker, still hiding his behaviours, and some of the people closest to us still do not believe he is alcoholic.

In hindsight, so very many things suddenly fell into place. I felt like I was reliving so many events and saying to myself "so THAT's why he did this..." . I felt like an idiot that what was so obvious with my new knowledge had not raised a red flag at the time. I still get flashes of memories, but now the memory is very different from what I thought it was originally.

I think not knowing for so long is why I have a hard time trusting myself now. If he could fool me so easily, if I could fool myself so completely, how do I know what I think I know now?

Just my experience.

mry

I had no idea. There are no addicts in my family. His mother took pain meds and his brother was an alcoholic but it never occurred to me that he could be one. We meet in college and he enjoyed drinking games far more than I did but they didn't continue after college.

I had no idea that he even drank more than he should until we'd been married 10 years and I saw him having a bourbon for breakfast. Even then, I didn't understand the alcoholic behavior and what it was doing to our relationship. He was going to a counselor and never told her about the drinking, just complaining about his crappy wife.

It took another 6 years before I realized that he was an alcoholic. He rarely drank at home and was extremely secretive about drinking on the way home from work. For a long time, I thought he was diabetic - he ate chocolate bars and gatorade and had horrible mood swings. If it weren't for his DUIs, his family would never believe that he is an alcoholic.

Even once I realized that he was an alcoholic, it wasn't until last year that I understood what that meant.

ZiggyB

I actually knew he had a drinking problem but it would wax and wane... as well as all of the endless promises that he would only drink socially... in hindsight I was a fool

kale

I had grown up surrounded with abuse and then had a very prolonged illness. I felt very defective. I did not understand what I was to blame for what I wasn't. I assumed others knew better than me and I was probably wrong, whatever the situation. I had no concept of my own happiness. I was lost and self-loathing.

I had felt so separated from others for so long that when my husband accepted me and acted nice to me, it felt like coming home. It was such a relief. I had been pretty isolated all through my teens and twenties due to the illness.

I was never around people drinking (I didn't even know what a drunk person looked like) and I had hardly a drop to drink myself (ever) until a year or so ago. It took me a while to learn what drunk sounded like and acted like. I'm sure he was drinking before we married. He had mentioned going on a six month binge after his last girlfriend broke up with him. Like being drunk 24/7.

He was someone who couldn't quite get it together to find a job, make decent money and move out of the house. He lived with his parents, his brother and sister-in-law, finally settling in his parent's backyard in a work shed that lacked heating and cooling or a bathroom. Later, he claimed to have been proud of living in a shed, and proud of living with his family and at his attempts or non-attempts at work. Denial, denial, denial. But I digress; this was after we married.

Just before we married, I was trying to pull the wedding together and I would ask for his help and he would say he would, but not do anything. Or he would say he would help, but only if I could go an unspecified amount of time with him not helping and with me being totally okay with him not helping. Mind-f**k, right?

I would inevitably become upset with his not helping as the wedding date bore down on us, and I would ask when he was going to start helping. Then he would become so, so upset and accuse me of not being able to care about him or fill his needs. And he would not help. At all.

So he spent a lot of time drinking and being generally horrible (through a plate against a wall) leading up to the wedding and I almost backed out. Dragged him to the marriage counselor, and left wanting to call the thing off. But I let him convince me that everything would be okay. I walked down the aisle not knowing who I was marrying.

Afterwards, when I told him I had felt conflicted and sad at the wedding, he took the opportunity to completely withdraw from me on the honeymoon. With few exceptions, he has never come back, only moved farther away in response to perceived slights. Every time I have reached a new benchmark of health for me, me moves farther away. Big breakthroughs on my part are a problem for him. He says I used to be so nice, when there was more wrong with me and why can't I be like that again?

I wasn't really nice, I was just was in a place where I accepted any and all blame that came my way. I saw myself as permanently defective and wrong and it was easy to get apologies out of me. I was a receptacle, easily manipulated, for someone who does not take responsibility for his own feelings.

Hindsight: I was a walking wound and totally unable to choose a partner who would be a partner to me. I can't say I should have done this or I could have done that. I always did the best I knew how and I'm so grateful to have been able to climb out of where I was and be happy for the first time in my life. Despite AH.

inpieces314

I knew. I didn't care, because I mistakenly thought he had it under control, although I do remember telling him I would never marry him, move in with him, have kids with him, etc. unless he stopped drinking.

Unfortunately, I have done everything except marry him. And try as he might, I absolutely refuse to do it. I wouldn't do it at this point even if he was sober.

Anyway, his disease progressed. And I ended up with a full-blown case of codependency. And I almost ended up an alcoholic myself. I attend AA meetings to make sure I don't become one.

It's hard now, because I am in a better place and he is not. And every time he is drunk, he tries to bring me back to that dark place where I thought I had to get my way out by either drinking or dying. But he will learn eventually.

I still have hope, which is amazing. I have realized this, that I have never had as much faith in anything as much as him.

I am different, I think. I don't care so much about the drinking, but the behavior that goes with it. If he could drink and still be respectful like he was, it wouldn't matter as much (although it would to an extent), but that was part of the progression-his attitude deteriorated along with his liver function.

Like Jekyll and Hyde. And getting worse all the time. THAT I never saw coming, or I would have run for the hills and never looked back.

CeciliaV

Looking back, I knew. We got married in 2003, but we started dating in 1996. At that time, he was smoking pot daily, and it wasn't too long afterwards that I joined in. From the time we got together, he would often drink too much in social situations. There were many, many parties & family gatherings where I left embarrassed by how much he drank & his resulting behavior. He often had an issue with controlling his drinking once he started, especially if there was scotch involved. It got to a point where we established to an agreed rule of "no brown stuff!" Over the years, it became clearer and clearer that he was just damaged in some way, broken inside. Many years of running from his problems caught up to him slowly at first and then it picked up speed when we quit smoking pot. That's when the spiral began for him, but it was a long time coming.

inpieces314

Yeah, sometimes there is a problem with them that has nothing to do with the addiction.

That's the one you never know about, and the one you never should deal with, because you never know when something could go very wrong.

Redheadsusie

I knew he drank a lot and smoked a lot of weed - I saw the signs and knew his first wife left him for the addiction problems. But I being the idiot that I apparently am - thought he would be better with me- it would get better - yada yada yada yada. When the drinking got super bad and the drugs he said and his Mother ( he is 50 mind you) you knew he drank and smoked when you met him- you need to deal with it. Well I ain't dealing anymore - 13years is enough- hindsight is 20/20.

Neagrm

I had no clue....

Audrey1

No idea, I'm afraid. On our first date, I thought it was odd that we drank three bottles of wine together and I didn't get sick. Now I realise he probably drank most of it. At the time, I was appalled we got through so much wine. I realise now he could easily have downed three bottles a night alone when he was drinking.

CodeNameGiggles

When I got together with my husband, I didn't know he was an alcoholic. Hindsight, I should have seen how much of a drinking problem he did have at the time.

We met in a degree path that is riddled with heavy drinkers - it was a subculture of our college experience, and it became a subculture of his career path - which I opted not to take the same career path. At some point, the weekend partying and heavy drinking was no longer my thing. I erroneously thought that if I "grew up", he would as well. Except that became a source of contention between the two of us - that I didn't want to go out and party all the time, and he did, and he would say to me that "I changed" and that it was all my fault because I bait and switched him on "who I really was."

His drinking, while a problem, was mostly limited to weekends until I got pregnant. Then it was all the time, and he started hiding it. That was 12-13 years into our relationship and about 10 years after we were married.

CentralOhioDad

I kew that my Wife, who is quite younger than me, was a 'party girl', but I thought that by marrying me (more conservative) that she would 'settle down' and change her ways. Part of my codie thought pattern I guess.

The joke (albeit not-so-funny) is on me.

rf1a

We both drank on weekends when we met 28 years ago. 10 years ago she started with daily drinking, 8 years ago addicted to prescription pills. two rehabs later and she is sober for 120 days, she is a ticking time bomb though.

SparkleKitty

I went into my relationship with XABF with my eyes wide open. I think I was curious, testing myself, and all told I got through my ten months with him with very few scars and no long-term financial woes. I was seeing a therapist the entire time.

That being said, I didn't "get" that my mother was an alcoholic until I was about 19 and out of the house. And even THEN I didn't understand what that really meant until I was about 32.