An alcoholic's journey through two marriages
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An alcoholic's journey through two marriages
This is a post that deals with some issues, which I have wanted to work through for a long time. I notice that many of the themes reoccur on this site and I am hoping that I can help people understand how alcoholism affects the relationships between an alcoholic and their partners. It is quite personal but I wanted to share. Apologies for the overly long post.
First, some basics. I am 10 weeks sober after drinking non stop for 27 years, starting aged 15. I drank heavily for approximately 10 years, abused alcohol for another 10 and have been an alcoholic for most of that time with extremely heavy drinking in the last 10 years or so.
I have been married twice and have two kids. My first marriage lasted 8 years and I have one child from that marriage and I am currently 6 years happily married with my second wife and have a young son. Here is my story and how my increasing alcoholism affected both marriages.
In my teens and early 20’s I always drank socially and usually with the objective of getting drunk. I never really drank normally but most people I knew drank heavily also. Think of a young professional guy hitting the pubs with his mates, followed by a club and drinking somewhere around 8 or 9 pints of beer and having a great time. I didn’t really drink mid week much at that stage and never felt a compulsion to drink. There was lots of drunkenness at weekends and generally I had a really great time.
I met my first wife in my mid 20’s. We both had solid jobs and worked hard and played hard. She was the first woman I loved. She worked hard and ran marathons but she had a history of depression. Alcohol was always present. By the time we got married in our late 20’s the warning signs were already there but of course we didn’t notice. I had started drinking at home at weekends and maybe one night during the week. Bottles of wine, lots of them.
She had developed an eating disorder (she is not an alcoholic) and I had started to drink to heavily when I could. We didn’t argue much, if ever, but we did start to put distance between us. Our sex life deteriorated which bothered me a lot and she had developed her own circle of friends, which centered around the gym. She was exercising compulsively and I was filling my time with drinking. To the outside world we were the model of young, professional success. One evening when she was away on a business trip I drank all day in the apartment and then was arrested and picked up a DUI. We both shrugged it off as an inconvenience and continued as usual. Our social life at that point revolved around drinking and partying and we just continued, not dwelling on how much I was drinking.
A year or two later we bought a house and had our son. We nested. There were a happy couple of years but I had started to bring wine home most nights. I would lie on the couch drinking and golfing with my friends at the weekend and hitting the pubs afterwards. She would work, exercise and then join me for a glass of wine. I was abusing alcohol at this stage. Our relationship was growing more distant at this point but we were still not arguing. We had started to live different lives and she didn’t seem to mind me drinking as much as I wanted and she never raised the issue of me drinking too much. If I drank too much and passed out on the couch she didn’t appear to mind.
After a couple of years of that I realized that I had been travelling for work too much and that I need to be home more so I quit my job. Rather than finding a new one I drank at home. This was around the time of the financial crisis and we hit some serious hard times financially. I just disappeared into a bottle and she continued to do what she did, work and exercise. I would wake up in the morning lying on my living room floor surrounded by empty wine bottles and beer cans. She would step over me and go to work. It was living a hell and I knew that something needed to change. One day I woke up, said I wanted to separate and relocated to Asia. She said ok and I left. To this day I am ridden with guilt on the impact on our son. It was a massively irresponsible thing to do but I saw no other way at that time. In my head, I needed to work to pay the massive mortgage and I was offered a big salary in Asia so I took it. I felt that if my wife was happy to separate that she didn’t love me deep down.
In retrospect I don’t think we really loved each other enough and I think we were hugely naive in what it takes to maintain a marriage and build a family. We were a pair of spoiled kids who wanted to have it all and we threw it all away without confronting the issues head on. Financially, we were broke and had huge debt and a big house. I had a choice between confronting the reality or selling the house and starting again and working the marriage or letting her keep the house and running. I ran. Its sounds cold and irresponsible but I do not regret this decision as you will see.
I met my second wife in Asia and I have been an alcoholic the whole time I have known her. The first few years after I met her I drank quite a bit but not to blackout. I was also working hard and paying a high maintenance/support to my first wife who I had divorced at that time. I kind of cleaned up my life but never stopped drinking. I fell head over heels in love with my current wife and never looked back – but – alcohol was always present. She doesn’t drink much if at all but she didn’t mind my drinking. I was always careful to hide the worst of it from her. I would get obliterated on business trips and drink heavily after she went to bed, hiding the empties from her.
She had made it clear that she wanted to marry at this stage and I proposed to her spur of the moment one night when drunk, We bought the ring the following day and married a year later. At this point I was balancing the three pillars of my life.: drinking, my relationship, my job. In that order. As long as all three were ok I drank as much as I could and kept going. I would wake up after benders, feel guilty and spoil her. My feelings towards here were genuine but maybe I was a little sweeter to her than I would have been had I not been drinking. I was on this roller coaster of work stress, love and booze. Adreneline, high emotions, drunken blurs and the challenges and excitement of living in Asia.
Things continued like this for a couple of years more and then my drinking started to get really heavy. Drinking most days, sometimes 10 or 15 days consecutively. Drinking to blackout one or twice a week. Some days of drinking all day. But I still hid a lot of it. How can you hide all day drinking or make it seem respectable? This was one of the things I did: I would wake up at noon after a bender the night before then arrange to meet friends for lunch or a brunch. I would book a nice restaurant that my wife wanted to go to and offer to pay the bill. I would invite some of my friends and hers and we would meet at 2pm. Then, I would order beers with lunch followed by wine. A social environment, good conversation. A nice time. Then we would drink into the evening. When some people left we would stay and then when my wife wanted to leave she would leave and I would stay out and drink half the night. I would convince myself that we were living a good life, convince here that she had some nice time with friends and I managed to wake up and drink all day. Everyone wins, hurrah!
My second wife is not like the first. She is argumentative and emotional, not always rational. She is strong willed, has overcome big challenges in her life and has a great career. We argued all the time and then made up and then argued again. We could argue 10 times a day but I always loved her and never contemplated leaving her. We both worked, I never missed a maintenance payment to my ex and just kept going regardless. Drinking, blacking out, arguing, making up, drinking again……love, rage, kindness, vulnerability. Despite all of this, and I know this may sound crazy, she never raised the issue of my drinking. We argued about just about everything else but my drinking. By this time the company had grown and I was well known in my professional circle but inwardly I was really struggling to keep it all together.
I was missing planned evenings with my wife. I was increasingly moody. Loving one moment and angry the next. I was irritable and impatient and grumpy. I was also energetic, funny and positive about life. She saw what she wanted to see but she is no idiot. I was getting to bed late, sweating terribly but we wrote it all off to work stress. My friends were all massive drinkers by this stage.
By this time I knew I was an alcoholic but had not admitted it to myself. I had started to experience dizzy spells during the day and also anxiety and panic attacks. When drunk one night I told her that I thought I was an alcoholic. The next morning we acted as if nothing happened and I kept going. By this time I was starting to see signs that my drinking was hurting our marriage. I then drank non stop one time for 10 days and woke up on a table in a cheap hotel. I had not been home all weekend. I had vague memories of meeting my friends over the previous couple of days. My wife was spitting fire.
I realized that I was killing myself and that I was an alcoholic. I quit that moment and I will never drink again. That was 10 weeks ago.
Here are some thoughts that run through my mind as I type all this:
- I hid the worst of my drinking from both my wives and I abused their trust. I would say I was working late and then go down to the pub and drink for hours and then fall into bed when they were asleep for example
- They never gave me an ultimatum. They chose to see what they wanted to see. Because we had money, good jobs, a house etc and lived a nice lifestyle they turned a blind eye to the drinking
- My alcoholism was progressive over many years. I ignored the bad incidents and pushed on. Remember that frog boiling to death in that pot of water? That was me. Even though I had periods of lighter drinking I always continued and eventually it always got heavier
- As things got worse I became more disconnected as a person from them. I avoided true real connection and focused instead on being nice, sex and going to nice places. The real deep connection faded into the background
- In all honesty, if either woman had given me an ultimatum to stop…”its either me or the drink” then I hate to say it but I think the drink would have won. It was only when I feared for my life that I stopped
- During these later years I was not violent or bitter. I would be angry but not at my wife per se. Just an angry, irritable, pissed drunk. Nobody I knew would have described me like that but that is what I was. I know it. There was a big foggy, drunken haze in my head and I was living life on auto pilot. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I am a gentle, warm person but when you are an alcoholic you have no time to be nice. All that matters is working to get cash and freeing up time to drink
10 weeks in now all that is gone. I have rediscovered what it is like to be home every night with my family and not itching for stimulation, chemical or otherwise. My recovery has only started and thankfully I got out of my hell before I lost my family. Had my wife walked out on me in these recent years I would most likely have drank myself to death. But she didn’t save me….her love and heart were always there for me, I just didn’t appreciate it. I had to walk right to the edge of the cliff and peer over the edge before realizing what I was doing. My first wife is happily remarried to a great guy and my first son still loves me. Maybe there is a higher power afterall.
First, some basics. I am 10 weeks sober after drinking non stop for 27 years, starting aged 15. I drank heavily for approximately 10 years, abused alcohol for another 10 and have been an alcoholic for most of that time with extremely heavy drinking in the last 10 years or so.
I have been married twice and have two kids. My first marriage lasted 8 years and I have one child from that marriage and I am currently 6 years happily married with my second wife and have a young son. Here is my story and how my increasing alcoholism affected both marriages.
In my teens and early 20’s I always drank socially and usually with the objective of getting drunk. I never really drank normally but most people I knew drank heavily also. Think of a young professional guy hitting the pubs with his mates, followed by a club and drinking somewhere around 8 or 9 pints of beer and having a great time. I didn’t really drink mid week much at that stage and never felt a compulsion to drink. There was lots of drunkenness at weekends and generally I had a really great time.
I met my first wife in my mid 20’s. We both had solid jobs and worked hard and played hard. She was the first woman I loved. She worked hard and ran marathons but she had a history of depression. Alcohol was always present. By the time we got married in our late 20’s the warning signs were already there but of course we didn’t notice. I had started drinking at home at weekends and maybe one night during the week. Bottles of wine, lots of them.
She had developed an eating disorder (she is not an alcoholic) and I had started to drink to heavily when I could. We didn’t argue much, if ever, but we did start to put distance between us. Our sex life deteriorated which bothered me a lot and she had developed her own circle of friends, which centered around the gym. She was exercising compulsively and I was filling my time with drinking. To the outside world we were the model of young, professional success. One evening when she was away on a business trip I drank all day in the apartment and then was arrested and picked up a DUI. We both shrugged it off as an inconvenience and continued as usual. Our social life at that point revolved around drinking and partying and we just continued, not dwelling on how much I was drinking.
A year or two later we bought a house and had our son. We nested. There were a happy couple of years but I had started to bring wine home most nights. I would lie on the couch drinking and golfing with my friends at the weekend and hitting the pubs afterwards. She would work, exercise and then join me for a glass of wine. I was abusing alcohol at this stage. Our relationship was growing more distant at this point but we were still not arguing. We had started to live different lives and she didn’t seem to mind me drinking as much as I wanted and she never raised the issue of me drinking too much. If I drank too much and passed out on the couch she didn’t appear to mind.
After a couple of years of that I realized that I had been travelling for work too much and that I need to be home more so I quit my job. Rather than finding a new one I drank at home. This was around the time of the financial crisis and we hit some serious hard times financially. I just disappeared into a bottle and she continued to do what she did, work and exercise. I would wake up in the morning lying on my living room floor surrounded by empty wine bottles and beer cans. She would step over me and go to work. It was living a hell and I knew that something needed to change. One day I woke up, said I wanted to separate and relocated to Asia. She said ok and I left. To this day I am ridden with guilt on the impact on our son. It was a massively irresponsible thing to do but I saw no other way at that time. In my head, I needed to work to pay the massive mortgage and I was offered a big salary in Asia so I took it. I felt that if my wife was happy to separate that she didn’t love me deep down.
In retrospect I don’t think we really loved each other enough and I think we were hugely naive in what it takes to maintain a marriage and build a family. We were a pair of spoiled kids who wanted to have it all and we threw it all away without confronting the issues head on. Financially, we were broke and had huge debt and a big house. I had a choice between confronting the reality or selling the house and starting again and working the marriage or letting her keep the house and running. I ran. Its sounds cold and irresponsible but I do not regret this decision as you will see.
I met my second wife in Asia and I have been an alcoholic the whole time I have known her. The first few years after I met her I drank quite a bit but not to blackout. I was also working hard and paying a high maintenance/support to my first wife who I had divorced at that time. I kind of cleaned up my life but never stopped drinking. I fell head over heels in love with my current wife and never looked back – but – alcohol was always present. She doesn’t drink much if at all but she didn’t mind my drinking. I was always careful to hide the worst of it from her. I would get obliterated on business trips and drink heavily after she went to bed, hiding the empties from her.
She had made it clear that she wanted to marry at this stage and I proposed to her spur of the moment one night when drunk, We bought the ring the following day and married a year later. At this point I was balancing the three pillars of my life.: drinking, my relationship, my job. In that order. As long as all three were ok I drank as much as I could and kept going. I would wake up after benders, feel guilty and spoil her. My feelings towards here were genuine but maybe I was a little sweeter to her than I would have been had I not been drinking. I was on this roller coaster of work stress, love and booze. Adreneline, high emotions, drunken blurs and the challenges and excitement of living in Asia.
Things continued like this for a couple of years more and then my drinking started to get really heavy. Drinking most days, sometimes 10 or 15 days consecutively. Drinking to blackout one or twice a week. Some days of drinking all day. But I still hid a lot of it. How can you hide all day drinking or make it seem respectable? This was one of the things I did: I would wake up at noon after a bender the night before then arrange to meet friends for lunch or a brunch. I would book a nice restaurant that my wife wanted to go to and offer to pay the bill. I would invite some of my friends and hers and we would meet at 2pm. Then, I would order beers with lunch followed by wine. A social environment, good conversation. A nice time. Then we would drink into the evening. When some people left we would stay and then when my wife wanted to leave she would leave and I would stay out and drink half the night. I would convince myself that we were living a good life, convince here that she had some nice time with friends and I managed to wake up and drink all day. Everyone wins, hurrah!
My second wife is not like the first. She is argumentative and emotional, not always rational. She is strong willed, has overcome big challenges in her life and has a great career. We argued all the time and then made up and then argued again. We could argue 10 times a day but I always loved her and never contemplated leaving her. We both worked, I never missed a maintenance payment to my ex and just kept going regardless. Drinking, blacking out, arguing, making up, drinking again……love, rage, kindness, vulnerability. Despite all of this, and I know this may sound crazy, she never raised the issue of my drinking. We argued about just about everything else but my drinking. By this time the company had grown and I was well known in my professional circle but inwardly I was really struggling to keep it all together.
I was missing planned evenings with my wife. I was increasingly moody. Loving one moment and angry the next. I was irritable and impatient and grumpy. I was also energetic, funny and positive about life. She saw what she wanted to see but she is no idiot. I was getting to bed late, sweating terribly but we wrote it all off to work stress. My friends were all massive drinkers by this stage.
By this time I knew I was an alcoholic but had not admitted it to myself. I had started to experience dizzy spells during the day and also anxiety and panic attacks. When drunk one night I told her that I thought I was an alcoholic. The next morning we acted as if nothing happened and I kept going. By this time I was starting to see signs that my drinking was hurting our marriage. I then drank non stop one time for 10 days and woke up on a table in a cheap hotel. I had not been home all weekend. I had vague memories of meeting my friends over the previous couple of days. My wife was spitting fire.
I realized that I was killing myself and that I was an alcoholic. I quit that moment and I will never drink again. That was 10 weeks ago.
Here are some thoughts that run through my mind as I type all this:
- I hid the worst of my drinking from both my wives and I abused their trust. I would say I was working late and then go down to the pub and drink for hours and then fall into bed when they were asleep for example
- They never gave me an ultimatum. They chose to see what they wanted to see. Because we had money, good jobs, a house etc and lived a nice lifestyle they turned a blind eye to the drinking
- My alcoholism was progressive over many years. I ignored the bad incidents and pushed on. Remember that frog boiling to death in that pot of water? That was me. Even though I had periods of lighter drinking I always continued and eventually it always got heavier
- As things got worse I became more disconnected as a person from them. I avoided true real connection and focused instead on being nice, sex and going to nice places. The real deep connection faded into the background
- In all honesty, if either woman had given me an ultimatum to stop…”its either me or the drink” then I hate to say it but I think the drink would have won. It was only when I feared for my life that I stopped
- During these later years I was not violent or bitter. I would be angry but not at my wife per se. Just an angry, irritable, pissed drunk. Nobody I knew would have described me like that but that is what I was. I know it. There was a big foggy, drunken haze in my head and I was living life on auto pilot. I didn’t mean to hurt anyone and I am a gentle, warm person but when you are an alcoholic you have no time to be nice. All that matters is working to get cash and freeing up time to drink
10 weeks in now all that is gone. I have rediscovered what it is like to be home every night with my family and not itching for stimulation, chemical or otherwise. My recovery has only started and thankfully I got out of my hell before I lost my family. Had my wife walked out on me in these recent years I would most likely have drank myself to death. But she didn’t save me….her love and heart were always there for me, I just didn’t appreciate it. I had to walk right to the edge of the cliff and peer over the edge before realizing what I was doing. My first wife is happily remarried to a great guy and my first son still loves me. Maybe there is a higher power afterall.
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Originally Posted by ubntubnt 
I notice that many of the themes reoccur on this site and I am hoping that I can help people understand how alcoholism affects the relationships between an alcoholic and their partners.
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Join Date: Nov 2014
Posts: 667
Excellent post. You write out the road map we all have seen. We each have different roadside scenery, but the path from normal to addiction to recovery seem to follow the same roads.
It does most of us here a great service to see a RA take responsibility for what they have done. Helps them clarify or validate that it can be an expected outcome. But it requires something like what you have shown us with your story, to give us the motivation.
Sadly many do not fare as well as you and your family has.
It does most of us here a great service to see a RA take responsibility for what they have done. Helps them clarify or validate that it can be an expected outcome. But it requires something like what you have shown us with your story, to give us the motivation.
Sadly many do not fare as well as you and your family has.
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I'm surprised you haven't been sober longer. That was my first reaction to your story. You've had some truly insightful and helpful things to say here -- not just in this post but in general -- and I'm glad you're around. 
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Thanks Amy, I guess years of trying to moderate and failing have given me plenty of time to assess all the problems. I have been round and round all of this is my head for years. It's a relief to have finally quit. I think my path to my bottom was a lot more destructive than the above post suggests. I was run over while drunk lying unconscious at the side of the street for over an hour and also had to turn off the life support machine on my best friend after he died of a brain hemorrhage caused by drinking and then bring his ashes back to his widow and two young kids. Even that was not enough to make me quit. This horrendous disease has caused me huge pain over the years and I hope that as few people as possible have to go through what i did. And I am clearly the lucky one.
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