solow

Hello everyone, I felt the need to share as I've had a bit of a difficult evening.

Around a month ago my husband left for a 3 month trip. At the time I was drinking and it was getting worse and worse, he hated it.

The problem is I only started drinking in this way after I met him and married him. He is a very domineering character and my entire life became controlled by him. I was completely isolated from my friends and family and I know that part of the reason I started drinking like I was was because of the stress and loneliness I was feeling. Although I know the choice to drink was mine and other, healthier choices were open to me that I didn't take.

Now, after just 1 month and with me feeling better than I have done in such a long long time he says he wants to come back now, 2 months early. My reaction to the news was clearly not as rapturous as he had hoped, I wasn't at all negative I just didn't squeal and cry tears of joy about it and I've just spent the whole evening going through the same old familiar exhausting routine of pandering to his sulks, imploring him to believe that I care, trying to explain myself only to get told that the explanation I've given shows that I don't care about him enough, that I love my family more than him and that we should break up and he should never come back (which he doesn't mean but says to make me cry and plead).

I feel exhausted and have given up trying. He cancelled my last 2 calls. It usually takes many more than that before he feels I've shown I'm suffering enough for him to sullenly pick up. That's my queue to cry and beg for forgiveness which he will finally, graciously give then act like nothing even happened, happy and carefree as can be while I struggle to recover from the emotional exhaustion and the sky high levels of anxiety I've been experiencing. But tonight I'm not up to the struggle.

I feel drained.

JD

What keeps you in this relationship?

solow

I dont do well with separation, I fall apart in fact. I think I would drown in grief if I leave. Im just very weak. And I also feel responsible for him.

DG0409

Sorry you're going through this. He does sound very manipulative.

I think in a situation like that it is so easy to get caught up in just trying to keep the peace and get through the day. Try to take a step back and think about if you really want to continue this relationship.

Whatever you decide, drinking won't help. Drinking to tolerate a bad relationship doesn't solve anything.

Try to take care of yourself. Eat something, take a shower, work out or watch a show.

The world will keep revolving even if you don't call him.

Is he abusive to you? Are you afraid he'll hurt you if you don't play his game his way? I ask this in the kindest way because it might affect the advice you get.

Upward2Enlightenment

Have you considered counseling?

loulou1981

Im sorry ur going through this, sounds like alot to deal with. Have u spoken to a therapist or anything? Its easy for me to say 'if ur unhappy u have to leave'......

sugarbear1

Have you read Men who Hate Women & the Women who Love Them
by Susan Forward? That was a turning point for me, after I read this. Then changes had to be made. I wasn't crazy after all!

DG0409

That sense of feeling responsible for him is a symptom of codependency. Melody Beattie has a wonderful book called Codependent No More that really helped me with similar feelings. But the bottom line is that he is responsible for himself and you are responsible for yourself.

What are your real fears of separation? Would it be worse than your life now?

SoberinSyracuse

This account of manipulation and abuse is scary.

I read a number of books about men's nonphysical abuse of women and then I was able to break free from a marriage to a man I loved, but in a dynamic that was killing me.

I sorely hate to see so many women being manipulated by men, and so often turning it upon themselves in the form of substance abuse.

Get some counseling for yourself, for abuse. Don't waste time trying to get couples counseling until you understand why you're tolerating this treatment and self-medicating with alcohol.

Definitely don't seek his permission or approval. Don't even tell him. Just do it for yourself and get your head straight.

This is abuse. It won't get better, but it might get worse. Get help for yourself and get strong in your own mind.

PurpleKnight

You need to put yourself first in all of this, if you're feeling better than you have in a ling time this last month, then that's not a great sign.

So sorry you're having to go through this!!

Hawkeye13

This is abuse--and now drinking on top of it is simply compounding the problem.

I would not let him come home early and I agree, get some reading done
and get a counseling appointment.

You are enough--it may not feel like it right now, but it's true

Soberwolf

Based on what you have said I'd say get out of the relationship even if you don't handle breakup's well its better than living like this

As for feeling responsible for him sorry but hes a grown man who can look after himself

The only way youl be happy is ending this relationship & focusing on your an life & your sobriety

solow

Hi Everyone and thank you so much for all your words of support.

I am actually sober at the moment and have been for the past week and am fully committed to remaining that way so I wasn't drinking last night. I'm staying at my mum's right now along with my older brother who has just returned from living abroad for a few years. He's also sober having had issues of his own in the past and occasionally attends AA meetings. So really I'm finding this the perfect environment for me to remain sober in these early days and, to be honest, I'm not really feeling the urge as I'm much more content in this environment than I was in my own home. My husband coming home would have meant I felt obliged to return to our flat on the other side of the city and I was scared of slipping into old feelings of isolation and depression that may lead to a return to drinking.

For now it seems he has decided to stay a bit longer and the issue has passed. However, I do know there are many, many problematic dynamics in the relationship as a whole and these are things I'm thinking about during this time apart. I feel like I'm finally rediscovering my sense of self and it's a real relief to me.

I have actually been attending counselling every other week for about 6 months now and that has certainly been helpful to me in terms of trying to make sense of whats been going on, sometimes when you're in a situation like this you lose the ability to see things from a rational perspective. For many months I barely spoke to and certainly never saw any friends or family. I was living in this strange bubble that was just me and him, all the time, day in, day out and it didn't help that we actually run a small business together so there wasn't even the escape of going to separate work places.

I would like to say that although it may seem blatantly obvious to an outsider, when you are in this kind of situation the worst thing others can say is "why don't you just leave?" If it were that easy I would and so would millions of other women. It's not because of stupidity or lack of backbone or weakness (although I know that's what I said last night - really what I was doing was feeling the need to apologise and excuse myself). Its because life is complicated and our relationships with others are complicated. The intricacies of an intimate relationship are well beyond convenient labels. Our interactions with each other are endlessly nuanced and every relationship contains elements of joy and elements of pain. I have just described one of many painful experiences, and believe me there are many of them, too many for the relationship to be called healthy. However, there are also many joyful, tender and loving experiences within that same relationship. Which is why 'just leaving' is not as easy to do as it is to say. It takes time and it takes an awful lot of thought and processing and courage to get to that point. Perhaps one day I'll find my way there.

For now, I need to take this time to focus on sobriety, finding my centre again and reconnecting with myself as an individual - the person I actually thought was gone appears to still be here and I am so relieved to find myself actually quite unchanged by the past couple of years now that I have the space to just be for a while.

Thank you all for your kind words. You really did help me through a painful time.

ALinNS

That is a great environment for you to be in and congratulations on staying sober.

As for the relationship, when I reflect on mine (24 years 11 months), I should have ended it many years earlier, like in the first year as I had an emotionally abusive wife which was due to issues she had in her childhood and relationships before we were married. We did try several counselors however when they started getting to the root of the problems she would stop going. I mainly stayed for our two young children and my career at the time required a fair amount of over sea's travel so I just tolerated it I guess.

I know when I look at the relationship I have now, I have never in my life experienced this kind of love and two way support in all areas, we have been together only 8 months and never once have we even come close to a disagreement, to me that is amazing as I have never had a relationship like this.

I wish you well, it's a tough decision. maybe your husband should join you for counseling and see if it helps.

All the best Andrew

AnvilheadII

I dont do well with separation, I fall apart in fact.

and yet with him being GONE for a MONTH you said you were actually feeling BETTER and when you heard he might come home sooner than expected, you began to crawl back into your hole.

i understand we can't just run out the door screaming, we have to think and plan, but you do need to really take a good hard look at this man and HOW treats you, all the ways he manipulates and demeans you and know that if you continue to stay long term, it will all tear you down so far you couldn't CRAWL to the door.

so stay sober every day, make the most of your counseling by TALKING about real stuff, stick here with SR and know you deserve so much more!!!

solow

Its more total, irreversible endings that I find difficult, especially if they're my decision. More than difficult in fact, I do genuinely lose it but perhaps I can deal with that given time.

As you said, for now I'm going to stick with you guys, stick with being sober and allow myself a bit of time to focus on myself.

solow

Thanks its good to hear about others' experiences and that there is hope for something better!

Dee74

Some great advice here - I hope you'll take it to heart.

The choice is yours of course but being afraid of endings is not really a great reason to stay in something.

Sometimes endings are a necessary step to getting to where we want to be?

D

EndGameNYC

Well done on your sober time.

I can't tell from your comments whether or not the bolded statement is a good thing or a bad thing. After all, you did start drinking heavily during the past two years.

From your comments, I don't see any joy, any affection or anything like love in your relationship. But I do see a great deal of fear. And suffering. On both sides.

Maybe you do feel as though you're "coming apart" when you're in the wake of a failed relationship, probably on occasions when you experience other versions of loss as well. But it's not like you're coming together in this relationship, either on your own, or together.

You've set your terms of engagement in a very rigid way. "When I get into a relationship, it cannot end. Otherwise, I'll fall apart." Yet you only started drinking heavily after you got into a relationship with an emotionally stunted, distant and passive-aggressive person. I don't believe in passive-aggression. Aggression is only more or less obvious, but equally destructive in all its forms. "The cruelest lies are often told in silence."

None of us likes questions such as "Why don't you just stop (doing whatever it is we're doing to destroy ourselves)?" "Why don't you just quit?" or "Why don't you just leave?" They're hard questions, perhaps also, at times, well-meaning but unhelpful. But they also force us to look at hard truths in our lives and in ourselves. So we tend to dismiss them without a thought, minimizing the power that's camouflaged by what we take as unsympathetic prodding to force a solution to our overly complicated problems. (Aren't they always more problematic than anyone else could ever know?)

Your arguments above for not acting are similar both in content and in the line of thinking to women who've stayed or remain in abusive relationships. It's a defense against change, certainly immediate change, in the impeccable clothing of logic and reason. "Keep off the grass!" The irony of it is that everything seems to make perfect sense when we throw in all kinds of complications. How does that work, exactly? And when did making decisions, or even a plan, to get us out of unhappy situations become such a problem? The more complicated we make our problems, the more difficult it is for us to solve them. And the more this demonstrates our unwillingness to change.

There are "complications" in every hard decision we make. And we make hard decisions in life, not because they are easy, but because they are hard. When we're in a an unsettled or destructive place in life, the most difficult solution is usually the best. It's also a truism that it's not the things we did in life that we regret the most, but the things we never got around to doing. The things that were, for eternity, going to "work themselves out on their own." The people we never got to know, the people we never told how important they are or were to us, the people to whom we never made amends, and the people to whom we never took the time to say "Thank you" and "You're welcome." The help we rejected, and the support we never gave. The drink we never put down.

Though you may not find, "Why don't you just leave?" helpful, it may help to look at how and why you got into this relationship in the first place and how it came to be that you've decided that you will not leave, despite the fact that it's the source of reliable and ongoing heartache.

You don't have to do anything at all right now. And you're clearly going to do whatever is you want to do. But you might ask yourself if this is the kind of relationship you've imagined for yourself, or even dreamed of. Do you imagine that your husband will just change by virtue of your doing emotional contortions in order to avoid his criticism? Or his sadistic acts of abandonment and threats of leaving? Something that, thus far, has not "worked" for you in any observable or meaningful way? Are you genuinely content to continue living the way you've lived for the past two years? Do you want more from a relationship, more for yourself in life?

Yes, my idea of a healthy and loving relationship is different than yours and everyone else. But throwing it into the wind because you've persuaded yourself that you won't survive the pain of separation is only a measure of the amount of pain that you're already suffering.

When we allow our fears to determine our decisions in life, then all our worst nightmares come true.

solow

Thanks endgame, you've given me much to think about. I'll consider what you've said. I think perhaps it's time to book my next appointment with my counsellor!