I stayed and am glad that I did so. I do it one day at a time, with the tools/steps of Al-Anon. My marriage is completely normal. Our relationship is fine/loving/close. I stayed because I wanted to, and I have not felt the need to leave. My life is fuller than it's ever been. If you are attending a healthy Al-Anon group, nobody should be giving you advice - we don't do that....we share ESH (Experience, Strength & Hope) and offer loving support.

You are asking extremely personal questions that others may not feel comfortable answering. I live this program to the best of my ability and truly stay as present as possible. At the end of the day, I feel I married for love and my love did not depart when the disease came 'back'. I met and married my AH in AA; I stayed sober (32 years) and he did not.

Al-Anon is about me, my journey, my recovery. I know through my efforts that if I decide to stay or I decide to leave, I will be OK. The program does suggest we not make any big decisions for about 6 months so we can get more clarity of mind before doing so. Of course, if there is abuse or concerns for safety, that doesn't make sense. There is no one solution that works for all and when we try to force solutions, we often don't find the release/relief we are looking for. This (for me) is why Al-Anon suggests we are gentle with ourselves, keep coming back and don't quit before the miracle happens. Keep coming back Elabella - and run from those who do want to advise you...only you can decide what's best for your life/situation.

Hi Elabella,

I have remained married to my A hubby. Like IAH and Betty said before me, it is one day at a time and alanon tools that support me.  It is not an easy road living with an active alcoholic! Some folks have given it their all and decided it was not the life they wanted to live.  Some stay for the kids.  Some stay for finances.  I stay because I love the man under the disease and unless he turns violent or something else that I feel is totally intolerable, I don't plan on going anywhere.  Perhaps if I was still quite young and had a different set of goals and mindset, I might not have stuck it out.  Everyone has their own threshold of what is intolerable.

I can see the disease progressing in him and I do find myself doing more and more on my own or with friends. The good news is that I am fine with that!  I have never been one that feels we need to be joined at the hip 24/7.  I think it is healthy to have outside interests and yet we still have things we enjoy doing together.  I don't consider ourselves quite roommates, but I think all  marriages end up  looking different than they did from the start.

There is always hope, but I really don't see my hubby seeking recovery.  He appears perfectly content and has an almost fatalistic view of his situation.  I find more these days I feel sadness or compassion for him, rather than anger.  However, because I choose to stay, I am trying to complain less about him....even to myself.  After all, I am making the choice to stay and make the best of my life whether he is as active as he used to be or not. I am concentrating on the good in him; his sense of humor, his sense of family; his generosity.  I thank God everyday for the activities he can still participate in and that he is still with me.....the awful addiction and all.  Again, if I was younger, I might feel differently.....however I know of no perfect marriage.  That is not to justify....it's just a fact.....there's always something.

I don't know if this helps or not, Elabella.  There is no right or wrong in whatever you decide......it is your life and I recommend praying to your HP for guidance.  There are some days that all I do is pray.....but I always come back to that quiet nudge that I am going to stay.

Blessings to you!

Ellen

Hi,

I was going to suggest the book and it's Alanon lit you can find online I believe, the Dilemma of an Alcoholic Marriage.

It's got a lot of good information, do take some of it tongue and cheek since it was written in the way back in the world .. lol.

It was a good thing for me to read while I was with my X because it gave me time to figure out what I wanted long term.

An A can only give what they can give, it becomes more about is it enough for me. I wanted more from a partner. Staying in the relationship meant, my own friends, my own life, raising the kids on my own, even though I was still with my X at the time. It wasn't enough for me.

It was the lesson I needed at the time. I am not sorry on any level I left, it was the right thing for both of us and more so for the kids.

I'm with Aloha in I'm on the side that did leave.

Big hugs,

S :)

Hi there
I guess I can raise my hand for this one. In the past I have felt a bit outside the norm in my meetings as well because most people's partners either found recovery or they also left their spouse. I have stayed with my AH through his active drinking. He still actively drinks. As others have said each relationship is unique so my situation may be different than yours. Take what you like and leave the rest.

My AH and I have been together for 18 years. I met him when I was 21 years old. We have been through a lot together. It wasn't until about a year before I started Al Anon (4 years ago) that his drinking became a problem for me. I like to say it that way because that is the truth. His drinking is definitely not a problem for him. I came to Al Anon as many do out of desperation. I had just come to the realization that his drinking was a problem in our marriage and I wanted solutions. The solutions I was looking for were to find a way to get him to stop drinking or how to leave him. I was at the end of my rope. Things in our marriage had not been good for a few years and I was desperately unhappy. We had been to therapy and I had viewed it as a failure because the therapist asked him to take care of his drinking (I heard that as she asked him to stop) and he didn't stop. I felt that our marriage was mainly focused on his drinking and his drinking was ruining our lives. I didn't like the way he spoke to me especially when he was drunk. I was constantly pleading with him not to treat me so disrespectfully. He would pester me when he was drunk and repeat himself and his questions over and over again. He did some crazy things when he was drunk like get out the car on the side of the highway and start walking refusing to get back in the car, grabbed the wheel of the car when I was driving and cancelling all of our phone, internet and cable services one night because I would not cancel my plans for an evening to come home and help him figure out how to work something to do with the cable. He spent a lot of money on alcohol. Alcohol was his main priority over everything else and I definitely fed into that for a long time. I was running around trying to fix everything that couldn't be fixed. Prevent blow ups, walking on eggshells etc. I was also trying to shield my daughter from his disease but not really able to do that. I sometimes say that I had two settings back then doormat or crazy person. I would put up and put up and put up with large amounts of crap and then eventually blow up about something/anything and felt totally in the right once I had enough justification. And no one could argue with me either.

I started attending Al Anon meetings and little by little things got better in my life. I found a sponsor and practiced the steps. I learned to detach. First I just coldly detached and we lived like room mates for half a year to a year. I slept separately did what I wanted when I wanted and didn't really give him much consideration. It wasn't ideal but it was the best I could do at the time. I learned a lot in that time period about how to take care of myself. How to love myself. How to respect myself. I started setting boundaries with people. Instead of pleading with my AH not to speak so rudely to me I called it out when it happened and simply said "please don't speak to me that way". Sometimes I heard my own words back to me. I started looking at when I was "overhelping" or enabling others and I started to pull back. This gave me more time to focus on myself. My AH did not stop drinking but one of the things he did do was investigate what he was doing that I found problematic when he was drinking and he started to curb those bad behaviours. When he was more intoxicated he stopped pestering me, he stopped being rude to me we didn't have the explosive blow ups that we once did. I developed other interests instead of watching him drink and monitoring his drinking. I started going to the gym with friends, going to meetings, gardening, reading etc. I started to feel like me again. Then I remember the day I was truly able to take the third step. It's like something hit me out of nowhere. I just had this strong feeling that I needed to give him back the responsibility for his drinking. I was always watching and monitoring and trying to control his behaviour. Something inside me said stop and just let him be responsible for it. From that day on I stopped worrying about his drinking. I decided if it wasn't a problem for him why was it a problem for me? If he did something rude or ridiculous while drinking I brought it up when he was sober and simply stated that it was unsafe/uncalled for and questioned him about why he would do it. I mean if someone who wasn't an alcoholic cancelled all our services without consulting me that would be a major issue in our marriage and so I treated those issues with seriousness. My expectations for how I wanted to be treated became important to me. We had some rocky times and I could not be sure we would stay together. I started to decide that I would take our marriage one day at a time. I still do. Things gradually began to improve. We both gained a lot more respect for each other. I see him trying to control his drinking and I see it as a disease now instead of what I saw it as before as a lack of love for me. I don't tolerate bad behaviour any longer and it didn't take long for that behaviour to change once I stopped tolerating it. That actually made me more mad at first. Turns out he has more control than I ever gave him credit for. I feel like we have both grown up a lot since I started Al Anon. We have a deeper more loving relationship than we did before. It's not all sunshine and roses. He still has times when he drinks too much. It tends to make me feel sad for him more than angry or personally hurt anymore. My life is much more peaceful. I've learned so many skills in living my own life. My life is no longer on hold waiting for the alcoholic to get better. I live my life based on what I want to do not based on fixing or "helping" other people.

I am so grateful to this program for bringing me home to myself. I used to doubt myself all the time. Now I am much more self assured and when I don't know who to trust I know I can trust myself, my higher self, my higher power. I don't need to worry if I am making a wrong decision. I have learned to listen to how I am feeling and make allowances for it. I have learned to accept myself more than I even thought possible. Having that as my foundation has allowed me to be more open to others and not lose myself or my confidence if we don't see eye to eye.

I am still married to my AH of 30 years. I am glad you asked this question because I was searching through the board wondering if this topic had been discussed and had not found anything about it yet. The alcoholism has definitely caused an intimacy issue. I will be honest, it has been non existent for a year now as far as that goes. I am still trying to deal with that part of being married to an AH.I I just can't tell if its AH age 50 also with his anti depressant medication or the drinking or all 3.  I am working through the lack of self esteem, that this has caused me, which has been an issue as far as arguing about it when AH is not sober all of our married life, and now this being non existent? There has been so much emotional damage and verbal damage about that all these years and I was able to push it aside and bury it but I am finding out AH is the reason I feel this way and why I have been seeking general counseling the last 2 years to find my self worth. Thankfully AH has never been physically abusive towards me but verbally and emotionally he has and I am trying to recover from that all of our married life.  I remember one night he AH was having a rage, not physically towards me but he took a gun and put it against his head and pulled the trigger. That is why I am so fearful he will hurt himself if I leave even temporarily to show him what he will be losing if he continues to drink and not seek help. We know  longer have guns in the house but there are other ways he can harm himself. I also love him, we have been together since he was 19 and I was 18.  I am literally all he has besides his kids. In the meantime, I am trying to learn who I am, how to heal from the verbal and emotional damage and not focus on the non existent intimacy

 

I am seeing the effects of AH drinking is causing him physically as well. I realize there is nothing I can do but its hard to watch. I have now had my eyes opened to how its affected my health. I have always known, AH is why I have the the insecurities I do, and how I lost myself over the years. It is hard to explain, but I ended up having to take anti depressants from, March until recently. The side effects put me into suicidal thoughts, something I have never ever had so now I am off of them,but that is what it took for me to realize how AH has affected me in all areas, so with that situation along with my counseling the past 2 years my eyes have finally opened to the point, I have to take care of myself and well being. My motivating factor of joining Alanon, to speak to others who have and are going through similar situations. I am also finding out and realizing how all this has affected our son. We have a close relationship. I have discovered the years of AH and I fighting and me telling our son, its the alcohol was actually causing our son to disrespect me. I was making excuses for his bad behavior. I grew up in a home where alcohol was not in our home. The advice I was given was ignore AH its the alcohol talking, he doesn't mean it, therefore doing the same thing to our son. I also discovered our son felt he had to be protective over AH yelling at me and would cause another argument to redirect AH yelling towards him. I have since apologized to our son and he has forgiven, but I still live with the guilt of how I have not handled things. My counselor has to remind me, I was doing what I felt was best during those situations, I was in survival mode. I know I went off topic here a little bit.

Elebella I don't think it is greedy or selfish to want the marriage to be the way it once was before the disease. I too wish I had the same thing. I am now trying to change the things I used to let him get away with, such as when he says something to upset me, whether its sober or not, I will not let him get away with it anymore. If AH is not sober, I will wait until he is sober and then talk to him about it. I am learning to leave the house for a little bit, to cool off, so I don't engage with AH. I had lost my voice over the years because it was easier to let AH verbally and emotionally abuse me, tune AH out and shove the hurt deep inside me than to escalate things any further. I realized 5 years ago that became a problem with important issues, that I automatically tune out negative things being said to me. I don't know about anyone else, but AH literally has not done anything to help out with the house for many years. I have the past several months have learned to be more direct with him and things are actually getting done, my point with this is the alcohol is all AH life is besides going to work and coming home. I can't tell you how many times I have been told to divorce my AH over the years. How many times I have left misunderstood as to the reasons why I choose to stay with AH.. Like I mentioned before, my eyes have been opened to how living with AH has truly affected me and I am trying to change things, for myself not AH but for Me.

No, I just joined this week for the message board. I am going to go to a face2face tomorrow my first meeting. I have learned a lot about myself going to my personal counseling basically because of AH, the emotional and verbal damage as a result. Then other factors but anyways I have been working really hard to speak up and put myself first.  I am at a place emotionally to work the program to help me with AH , I realized there is no hope in AH stopping, so now its time to seek other guidance with Alanon

Thank you all for your shares. This is such a complicated journey for me. On the one hand , I love my AH, on the other hand I absolutely abhor the lying, abusive and manipulative jerk he can be. Is it the disease 100%? Or is it actually that he IS a lying, abusive and manipulative jerk who just happens to have a drinking problem?? How do we know??

Freetime wrote:

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Ela, I can only tell you my experience on separating the drinking from other behavior.

In my husband's case, when my daughter and I clearly and calmly told him of some specific behaviors that bothered us, he stopped doing them, although he continued drinking. The behaviors were being argumentative at family gatherings, and playing loud music in the middle of the night when I was trying to sleep. He was never abusive either physically or verbally. He actually asked us to have a code word that we could say to him if he was doing those behaviors. That convinced me that he was a good person with a bad disease.

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How lucky you are...if only each and every case, person, and so forth, were just that way...

Thank you for sharing.

-- Edited by Bo on Sunday 28th of July 2019 11:47:13 PM

I remember having this conversation about Jekyll and Hyde with my husband. He had quite seriously asked what my problem was. (Alcoholic logic I myself had years and years prior to that chat, ie my drinking hurts me and my life is my life so *"$# off). I said he is this beautiful, generous, straight up person but also he is a selfish, mean and arrogant person and I don't know which one is the real him. The conversation changed nothing in and of itself at the time but it did help to clarify for me the confusion I felt. Later that clarity helped to see that there is a person and there is a disease and the two are distinct. Sometimes though being able to love the person is very difficult when there is a reliance on the person for some essential need. I don't have any essential needs of him today, I do not think I ever was an essential need to him, just something beautiful to have. I'm not sure why we are still married except that we have love for each other and two very deep mutual attachments being our island home and our children. Why do people get married?