Get Away, Get Gone
I told a man to leave his wife yesterday.
The internet is a strange place.
For about two years I’ve been a spectator on Reddit (which is basically an online collection of forums that you can peruse based on your personal interests.) I have only ever read other people’s posts and comments on topics like: easy electives at NC State, the best countries/cities in Europe for solo traveling, unsolved mysteries, and history memes that are actually kinda funny.
A few months ago, I started following the “sober” and “alcoholics anonymous” threads. It seems to be 50% firm community support and 50% “I have been drunk and on coke for 5 days and I think I need to take a break so how do I do that? I’m not an alcoholic like you guys are—you guys are pathetic, but any advice on how to easily stop the urge to get drunk and high with minimal effort on my part would be appreciated, thx.” Luckily, 15 years of facebook politics have taught me the “look, don’t touch” method of observing other people’s idiotic thoughts through the interwebs.
Yesterday, however, a man posted this:
My wife has been lying about her drinking and I’m not sure how I should handle it. We’ve both always been social drinkers and it was not unusual for us to polish off a bottle or two of wine on weeknights. I slowed down this past year, just because the hangovers are getting to me as I get older. Being sober (or having only one glass) made me aware of just how much my wife was drinking on her own. It was a lot. Over the next few months, I noticed that our recycling bin was filling up with wine bottles quicker than usual. It was concerning, and it made me more aware of how often she was staying up late alone and struggling to get out of bed in the morning. As long as she was “alright” otherwise, I wasn’t going to comment on her drinking. It seemed like a judgmental, self-righteous thing to do and apart from the sheer amount of alcohol that she was consuming, it hasn’t really caused any problems. Then two months ago, we were at a dinner party at a friend’s house. Everyone (except the hostess, who was 5 months pregnant) was drinking, but only sipping on glasses of wine. I didn’t notice that my wife was drinking heavily or anymore than anyone else, but by the time we sat down to dinner, she was slurring and clumsy. I was so confused. It was obvious that she was drunk and everyone could tell. I made her leave as soon as dinner was over, and I had to carry her to our car. She fought me the whole way home and continued to yell at me incoherently until I went to bed. She stayed downstairs and continued to drink more. When we both got home from work the next day, we sat down and had a long talk about her drinking—I didn’t have to say it, she said it first—but I did let her know that I’d been worried for a while and gave her the details of how she had behaved the night before because she didn’t remember most of it. She’d attempted to “cut back” before and it didn’t work, so I told her that if she wanted to quit, I’d quit too and we’d build a new, different, better lifestyle together. She went her first AA meeting the next night and has been going every night since. She goes to the later meetings (8:00/9:00) and I wasn’t sure why, she said she liked those groups better. But it only gave us an hour or so to hang out together before I went to bed. She would stay downstairs and come to bed in the early hours of the morning, claiming that she just couldn’t sleep without drinking. I believed her. This was the routine for the next few weeks. I’m embarrassed that it took me weeks to notice, but our recycling bin was still full of wine bottles even though neither of us was supposedly drinking at all. When I asked her about it, she said that she’d found them on the patio from weeks before, or that she’d been pouring out the half-empty bottles on the rack, knowing they’d gone bad. There was no way that “leftover” empties were filling our bin every week. I know quitting is hard and I know that she has a problem and a desire that I just don’t understand. We both have family members that struggled with alcoholism. I can handle the trial/error of her getting sober. The lying is what is bothering me now. She’s waking up sober and swearing she didn’t drink the night before after I went to sleep. She also must be stopping at the store to buy wine after work and before going to her meetings, if she is even going at all. I don’t want to force her or threaten her and make the situation worse. Should I let this play out for a while and let her figure out the seriousness of her problem on her own? Or should I confront her about the lying? So far, this has been a joint effort and it has not affected our marriage. I am afraid that if I confront her, she’ll start seeing me as an enemy and I don’t want that. I want us to solve this problem so we can get on with our lives together. Any advice would be appreciated. Thanks!
People told him to be patient. People told him to confront her about the lying, but to remind her that he was 100% on her side and that they would get through it together. People told him to start watching her like a hawk. People said that she would get angry, but that he shouldn’t take it personally. People explained to him how scary quitting can be for people like his wife and he should be understanding and comforting. More than anything, people told him to go to Alanon meetings where he could get support for his plight of being the spouse of a struggling alcoholic.
Underneath all of those displays of support was my first ever message to an internet stranger:
Leave.
Hypocrisy and High Treason are my indictments. The other alcoholics may carry me to the guillotine—I won’t fight them one bit.
Alcoholics Anonymous is a community full of people who lost all control and managed to regain a few morsels of it. But let’s ignore our current morsels of control and focus on the time when we felt as if we had no agency and lost control of everything around us. I’m launching another full-blown betrayal on my alcoholic brethren by revealing this, but here goes: we could always control our drinking. We were controlling our drinking when we were drinking. Do you have any idea how much tact, planning, and manipulation is takes to get drunk on the sly every day?? A LOT. We were controlling the parts of our drinking problem that we wanted to control and claiming to have a complete lack of influence on the actual swallowing of booze.
I make that accusation with the crystal-clear memory of what it was like to feel like I had no control. No choice. I remember sitting in my car in the parking lot of the ABC store, sobbing, and counting raindrops as they hit the glass between swipes of my windshield wipers—anything to distract myself and postpone the inevitable. I also remember looking at the clock and saying, out loud, “Well, ‘God,’ I gave you 28 minutes yesterday. Today I gave you 29. You didn’t come.” Every day I hoped that the “inevitable” would be divine intervention. Inevitably, every day, my two feet carried me into the liquor store, then my two quaking hands grabbed a plastic bottle of Traveler’s Club and counted out the $5.98 (tax included) in exact change. Then I’d return to my car in that parking lot with the God-deficit and immediately pour a few ounces into an empty Starbucks cup.
Sitting at the last stoplight before our apartment, sipping latte-flavored ethanol, I was not feeling proud at all. I wasn’t laughing maniacally, victorious in having gotten away with it for another day. I was angry; enraged with the universe and the innerworkings of my shitty psyche that made alcohol seem essential to my homeostasis. I was angry at everyone and everything operating near me for not understanding and not caring and shaming me for my drinking without considering all the factors that drove me to excessive drinking in the first place. After a few more ounces of coffee-vodka, I would yell that at them until they hung up the phone or slammed a door in my face. The worse my drinking got, the worse my drinking got. Yeah. I was drinking about how much I was drinking, and I was drinking about how everyone knew how much I was drinking.
Nobody in my life was shaming me. Not a single person that I loved, or that loved me, was telling me that I was, “evil,” “selfish,” “weak,” “garbage,” “useless,” or any derivative of those. They just wanted me to stop. They wanted me to get better. Just the as much, if not more than I wanted me to stop and get better. But the solution wasn’t presenting itself. I tried AA. I tried white-knuckling it. I went to rehab. Twice. The urge to drink didn’t go away because all of those failed methods made me feel like I was broken; like I was subhuman and incapable. Through it all, the only thing that made me feel like I was a substantial person (or a person at all), was getting good and drunk.
I was confronted, politely, many times about my drinking and my subsequent lying. Even so, they were standing by me. As long as they stood by me, I thought that I was doing enough right in my life that I could keep drinking away the fear and insecurity. I thought I was worth all the trouble. For the record, I did have a plan to quit drinking: I was going to keep drinking, and keep drinking, until my demons drowned in the deluge of vodka, and one day I would wake up to find that my troubles were all gone, and I could just stop drinking because I didn’t need to drink anymore. Yes… I actually believed that.
That’s not what happened. Despite every warning, I drank away my worth.
Leave.
I can roll my eyes and keep scrolling when people want to know which geology professor is the most lenient and if hostels in Plovdiv are safe for women traveling alone, but I couldn’t not throw up a shield between an otherwise happy couple and the utter devastation of addiction. It nearly killed me on the field, I’m not buying a ticket to watch it happen from the bleachers.
I have nothing but empathy for the internet stranger, and I certainly have empathy for the internet stranger’s wife. I was that woman. I was that wife. I want her to get sober and I want their marriage to work—maybe a little too much. I know I’m projecting, and there’s a chance that I’m using this anonymous couple as a vessel to retroactively correct my own mistakes.
Leave.
Now. You don’t deserve the abuse that’s coming, and she won’t understand the collateral damage of her behavior until you remove yourself from her orbit. Kick her out. Cut her off. Force some distance. Focus on yourself. Get comfortable with the idea of a life without her. Let her sit and drink in her life without you. There’s a good chance that she’ll just keep drinking, and at least you won’t have lost years to a dead-end road. But maybe… maybe, she’ll get it. Maybe she’ll look down the barrel of a life without you in it and realize that the price of drinking was you. And she’ll never want to drink again. She’ll go to meetings and come home sober. She’ll actually get rid of all the wine on the rack; down the drain, not down the hatch. Every day, whether you are looking or not, she will prove over and over and over and over and over again that she can beat this thing. She can beat it for herself, but she can keep beating it for the rest of her life, for you. So, leave. Now. Before her addiction makes you forget that there is a woman in there that you want to spend the rest of your life with. Leave before you see her worst. Leave before you hate her. Leave so she can come back.
The internet is a strange place.
