Hey hubby, your wife’s alcoholism is right under your nose. But how can you know? Behaviors. They are everything.
My Wife’s a Drunk, But I Don’t Know it
Dear Doug:
My wife, to whom I have been married for eight months, is making me wonder if we got married too young. She’s just 23 and I’m 27.
She has a habit of going out with friends, getting drunk, and staying the night at her friends’ homes. I don’t want to be a control-freak and tell her she can’t go out, but the fact that she wants to spend the night with her single friends and get drunk is troublesome. What should I do?
Signed,
Un-controlling husband
Dear Codependent,
Other columnists might say your wife is trying to “hold onto her carefree single days.” While they might suggest it’s unfortunate she can’t do that without getting smashed, at least she’s not driving until she sobers up the next day. Such columnists would suggest that you both widen your circle of friends in a bid to spend more time with other more mature couples.
Incredibly, such columnists would completely miss the root of the problem: your wife has alcoholism, a disease that causes her to biochemically process alcohol very differently from the way a non-addict like you processes the drug.
It’s hard to grasp the idea that alcohol makes the alcoholic act in ways non-addicts never would. Would you ever dream of leaving your wife (especially your newly betrothed!) o that you could go out drinking with your friends—and then spend the night at one of their homes? Of course not. Yet she does this frequently.
Whether you married too young is impossible to say. However, you married an alcoholic. Contrary to the extraordinary claim a columnist might make, she is not trying to “hold onto her carefree single days” and widening your (or her) circle of friends will do nothing to solve the problem. Nor will hanging out with “more mature couples” do anything to make her act more mature.
She needs to get sober and fast, before your marriage is irreparably harmed. You need to do whatever you can to arrange an intervention with a qualified interventionist. Be aware, however, that you may be swimming against the tide: alcoholism is heritable, so her parents may have the disease as well. Her friends are alcoholics. You will have to search far and wide to find enough people willing to help intervene to have an effect. And if you can’t, after at least giving her a choice between you and the bottle, leave her before she takes you down with her—because living with an alcoholic will do that, and hard. As the great alcoholism authority George E. Vaillant put it: “Outside of residence in a concentration camp, there are very few sustained human experiences that make one the recipient of as much sadism as does being a close family member of an alcoholic.” You have not come close to experiencing the worst of it, yet. You don’t want to.
(Source for story idea: Dear Abby, October 16, 2012)