Knat84

Craft guru! lol. Yes, I am going to see if he'll cut back. At most, see if he can be chill with two a night. (heh. Hope he doesn't say 'okay' and goes out and buys the 9.8% ABV 'Golden Monkey' beer. Have you had that?) - I will definitely hit the panic button if I see him with a main-brand domestic. (With exception of local craft beers...aren't generally main brand, though.) Thanks for your input!!

Knat84

[QUOTE=Solar;4611755]Not often do I see a story about someone who is almost exactly like I was before I stopped drinking. Your husband is that someone.

I was the kind of guy to come home from work and drink a few high gravity beers. I'd drink them pretty much every day. I would read stories about people who binge drank and blacked out - that wasn't me. I would read about people who woke up in the morning and started drinking - not me. Getting DUIs - not me.

I started with 2 or 3 a night. Eventually I worked up to 4 or 5. 6 high gravity beers in one night? I don't even know if I got to that point. But let me tell you that after 6 high gravity beers you've taken a significant amount of alcohol.

It sounds like your husband manages to remain happy and productive with his drinking. I started out that way, too - but eventually I started to get sluggish in the mornings. I would drink a lot of caffeine to get me going and then drink alcohol in the evenings to come down from the caffeine. The pet projects I was working on would sit unfinished as I went into a near comatose state every evening.

I would always ask myself "do I have a drinking problem?" and then compare myself to people who had big drinking problems. Of course, I'd always come out ahead. But trust me, I had a problem. After daily drinking several high gravity beers, your system gets attuned to it - or at least, my system did. I was addicted - maybe not to the point where I absolutely had to drink every day, but definitely to the point where if I went without for a couple of days, I would feel "off" and have really strong cravings for it.

While I realize that it is his body and his right to drink, you might at least recommend to your husband that he go ahead and get checked out by a doctor, just to see where he stands. My guess is that he's got a fatty liver - the first step toward cirrhosis. You might also ask him to go a couple of days without alcohol and see how he feels - not because you're trying to control his drinking, but because he might personally want to find out where he stands and see how his body feels after abstaining for a while.

Today it's 6; tomorrow it may be 7; maybe in a few years it will be 12?

I personally stopped the downward spiral before it got too bad, and my life is so much better now that I have. Not because I was incapacitated when drinking - I hadn't got that bad yet. But today I'm healthier, happier, more motivated to succeed, and I can live my life without worrying whether or not I have a problem with my drinking. Not drinking = no problem.

Wow. Crazy. I'm glad that you got it under control before it went too far gone. Yeah. My husband has never had a dui or anything such as that, either. I'm going to first ask him to experiment with not drinking for a couple of days just to see how he 'does' feel. That is a good idea. You know, he also recharges his batteries in the morning with an espresso. Also, he has been having trouble sleeping. You know, I wonder if these two things are related. Caffeine in morning, beer at night... who knows? We'll see.

I am so glad that your life is better now. Not to sound rude, lol, but your story definitely is putting some fear in me! I would not want to see my husband unproductive, as that is just now in his character. If I ever saw him NOT doing something, I would know something was wrong. He always has to be doing something or he will get depressed.