This One's For You

I really hope that you will be one of the readers.

My lover is a serious alcoholic, I knew this from the first couple of weeks after we have met, and it has been 3 years now... I've been seeing it since that time and no one had to tell me about it.

As a matter of fact, we would always avoid talking about it. And some of the things about my increasingly drunk lover is that she would always forget about me when the drink too her day or night away if not both, that was the first of the things that the alcohol made her do or change into, sometime she would be violent towards me and starts shouting and screaming and starts hitting me but I never used to shout back or hit back because I know she was drunk,  which I know now means that the forgetting and acting irrationally were some of the symptoms of many, not the reason: She forgot because she was drunk, not because she disliked me.

But after that when she's back to herself, I knew that my sober lover loved me very much, that took care of me and stayed by my side and never left me or upset me, even bought for me matching bralettes and rings for me and her and told me that she will always love me and will never forget me and made sure I was feeling fine, not sick nor upset. And always made breakfast for me and packed it for work with lots of love notes inside and messages me and calls me every now and then to make sure that I was ok, but sometimes she forgets to even bother dialing my number or even recharging her phone to check up on me with barely a smile in my direction but a rare look of despite towards me... Which made me feel like I wasn’t first on her list but now seemed last, was really confusing. I was very confused and lost to take it personally. I really felt nervous and lost in thought and its these very things that I have kept for all of those years and for the upcoming ones.

Mostly, my lover drank whenever I drop her to work or her friend's house or whenever I went out for work or to see my family, one day I had to sleep at my mother's house because she was feeling unwell, so I didn't really experience my drunk lover right of the bat too much.

Around 2 am as I was laying in bed I get a call from her friend telling me that my lover is too drunk and she's making a problem everywhere she went.. It made me feel so confused because shes like this on one hand and on the other I was being my mother's side since she was very ill, but I had to go out to my lover quickly and take care of it to come back home on time for my mother.

when she seemed groggy or out of sorts the next morning and every next morning. I used to wake up to our usual morning routine but it was absent and not happening, no one was there to eat breakfast for me, no one was there to make lunch for me for work, no one was there for me to even say I love you.

In the night, sometimes I would wake up to go to the bathroom or go get a glass of water, even though it was very late in the night, instead of the apartment is quiet, there were these obvious sounds of life, footsteps on creaking floorboards, sounds of closing cupboard banging. My lover would be in the kitchen or on the phone and I could hear one side of a phone conversation and it's so odd, to begin within the first place!

ts like eavesdropping but the picture that is drawn seems to be very strange and mysterious than if you could hear the other person. It had to be after 2 AM in the night who would she be speaking too!?

Sometimes I see her in the most random places passed out or sometimes worse.. she tends to cut her self for god knows what reason...

Because of her alcoholism, I went to jail trying to save her from being behind bars, something I never thought would happen have happened and went to jail...

Yes! you're an alcoholic!! I've finally said it to her, after such a long time I just told her when we were going to bed, she stayed in silence and I just crawled beside her and hugged her and gave her a kiss on her forehead.

As an adult, now I would have one plan of action, one approach for dealing with my lover, no matter what under no circumstances I would let her drink as much before or after 12 pm. Any breaking of this rule would result in an unpleasant conversation or a fight that I would regret and would make me feel unpleasant the whole day and then she forgets about it as usual. I have always known and said it to myself "nothing good ever happens after 1 am" well.. with my lover it was true, except it was 4 am, you could hear her voice and her movements as she started drinking, and as a matter of fact, years later around say 3:30 pm? just right when she was leaving for work I could hear silence but not too long after I could hear the sound of a  what I'm thinking a beer can that has opened and minutes later I could hear her voice thickened and heavy, surprised that she has not gone to work but went into the kitchen instead, just within half an hour to 40 minutes she was wanting to quarrel or worse, sad and unwilling to cooperate.

A full-on encounter with my drunk lover very late 2 nights ago was something I intuitively avoided. As a supporting lover, I did not have the courage or any voice to speak to her about it again. As a matter of fact sometimes even on special occasions such as my birthday or her or our anniversary, My lover drank and I just became invisible to her. I had graduated to become a manager in the company I am working in just to get her attention to have her interest instead of just drinking... In some ways, whenever I thought about it through my years with her were more volatile and tougher, the relationship was much quieter and sadder. so much more desolate.

I knew that my lover was an alcoholic but I decided to spend the rest of my life with her, and I kept this knowledge as if was my very own secret, not hers. I was and am, as a sober person, even at this stage in our relationship, better at hiding her alcoholism than she was, anyway...

She was pretty good at it for a while, this threw off the boyfriend-girlfriend dynamic significantly, and with time I became a textbook lover of an alcoholic. This fact, just talking about the word of her problem, worries me because this problem is always a serious matter, but it also simplified my focus and it was like the last part answer to this code that I cannot crack. It made sense, I felt like I was relieved that I found out about her problem when she was hiding it all along, I mean her personality changes from time to time and the fact that she became less reliable. and come to think of it, all of it makes sense and made organized my feelings around alcoholism as a disease rather than simply something to hide and be embarrassed about, something to brag about.

Alcoholism teaches you to compartmentalize  your relationships, and even though I loved very much and always hurt me to see her like this, I couldn't talk to anyone about it, I had to do something about it and have a real talk with her, Ironically, the only person I could be fully honest within this situation was my mother.

I think about all of the confrontations since then with my lover now had a flinch, the idea of someone who she doesn't know that I knew about her problem would come to her and be like "oh hey  I found an answer to your problem. I know what is wrong with you, and there is a solution.” I felt once I’d latched onto the concept of alcoholism, a great relief: Here was a plan, with a fix, a solution. Just like me before I spent a long time paralyzed by inertia and fear and anxiety, and then I latched onto a solution that spurred me to action. This path seemed clear, I only needed to confront my lover carefully and present her with my plan.

The thing is, I didn't know yet was how badly that would go and how badly it will always go. For all the lying by omission, I learned to do for the outside world, the love of my life and her alcoholism honed techniques for evasion and lying that I simply would never be able to breach. It was only in its begining and nowhere near its end of trying to mobilize and change her, and even though I would feel nothing but defeated over and over again, I still knew till this very day that it is better to live without even trying.

I have said it to her, that there was a cure to this! there was help for it, it was just simple. "Your an alcoholic," I said it to her. I went to her and hugged her, and she assured me that she was fine, she reassured me that I, we are safe and that she loved me. and then she ignored me... and later threw the beer can to my face...

My lover has hidden her drinking problem from everyone but not from me... she either considered me too stupid or knew that I would not have a problem with it.

People everywhere who are in relationships with alcoholics, just like Al-Anon or any other organization or family group described the way being in a relationship with or being loved by an alcoholic changes you and it really does. what I found to be most true for myself, was the fact that I lost my own identity. I was always nervous, and always worrying and always losing my edge, I dreaded and handled personal criticism very poorly; and more than anything else, I found it easier to focus on other people than to focus on myself. What I'm doing is something I struggle with today, I can always find someone else to focus on rather than taking care of myself or my own business. In some ways, I was erased.

Before I became a lover of an alcoholic, I was the first and one of the best in ranks, the only one in her life. The only boyfriend of an alcoholic girlfriend. I knew with most of my being what was wrong with her from about the third week and was certain of it by the fifth. By then, I would have walked through fire for her, and there was occasionally the sense that such a scenario might actually happen and would be necessary...

This.. a lover willing to walk through the fire for his lover is just another classic tale of a love life with an alcoholic spouse. Confused with weird emotional thoughts, nearly all my feelings for my lover then and even many of them now can be explained by an entry-level rehab counselor as “part of this s**t.”

I.. think I knew that my lover drank too much, too often.. even years before I did but I used to control the amount I drink, I still didn't want to reach out to anyone we knew for help, I have always believed this because my lover eventually stopped drinking around our friends, she still hid her drinking from them and everyone we knew but not from me.. This is one of the most upsetting and manipulative parts of a relationship with an alcoholic parent: They use you and turn you, inadvertently, into their protector, a liar. I became secretive and guarded, not just around friends but even around my own immediate family. I could have resisted; I could have raised hell and told our friends every time that she drank, but I just wanted peace and hoped that each time was the last.

All I ever wanted is for it to stop... her addiction, her lust for the alcohol and for her to simply cease being what she was and is now. I didn’t have a concept of alcoholism as a disease, and with a child’s sad and frightening simplicity, I figured that she simply could stop if she wanted to. She probably could stop for me. Why would someone do something that they knew was bad for them, that made them different than their ideal self? Only a lover would oversimplify this; only a lover could see reality so clearly, as this is, honestly, the problem every alcoholic must face eventually: The only solution is the simplest, hardest thing in the life to make it stop.

I knew this very well and so quick and clear and altogether, and yet. I was so powerless... Little did I know how long I would remain powerless and how it would tear me apart, that this is ruining relationships, trusting and having faith in someone you truly loved, has added nothing but misery and hardship.

All this time I look back at my attempts to interact and reach out to my lover and also attempts trying to focus on my day to day things to do such as my work and being there for my friends and family, and I see everyone was in the shadows and in the dark because I was only focused on my lovers problem. Her alcoholism broken my ability, even in my normal life with the people in my life and connecting with them.

But having my lover by my side has changed all of that, because being by her side and being there for her makes me happy, even if her problem upsets me I am still there for her no matter how many times I want to run away from all of this, I will always come back.

I know that I have her in my life during her midlife burst/crisis, I will always be her sheer force.

It's not always good to drown yourself in alcohol just because you're having a bad day.

No,

it’s best to get to know people. Sometimes, it’s best to reach out and share things. Sometimes, it’s best to simply burst into tears when you’re having a bad day. It’s okay to cry in public. It’s okay to tell someone you’re in pain.

It is okay, it is really okay to just be alone sometimes and just cry or scream or however, you wanna do it.

I'd spent most of my time trying to help the ones I love but at a cost and that cost is forgetting myself. NEVER forget yourself because you also matter just as much as the person you love, my emotions sometimes overwhelming me, calling out to strangers and old friends. Helping random people on the street who’d dropped everything out of their pocket or hand, or simply some random person on the road or street who needs to be dropped somewhere or help anybody who looked lost. 

All this time with the one I love has changed and made me more interacted with people.

I've learned, well during the days lived, that changing my lover was never an option, no matter how I struggled. But that didn’t mean that change wasn’t possible. It was simply that the changes would be in me and not her also to be better people.

Reviews

[Chris Shaw]

This is such a sad read, but one of enduring love too. It is a disease, we have to remember that. Some people can accept they have a problem, others won't hear of it. What is certain though is that living with an alcoholic is very difficult indeed, the mood swings and in some cases the violence. What is worse is that the personalities of loved ones in the same household change too. Those people have to take care of themselves, they must not neglect themselves. You write so eloquently of your experience, my heart goes out to you.

Chris

[Joey Nizz]

It surely is, its one of the worst habits that is turned into a disease, whats worse is that some people would never except it and just live with is like a routine, it is difficult to live with an alcoholic but sometimes endurance and the love would keep the relation go on, hopefully one day everything will be normal.

Thank you for your honest review.