Dear Amber,  

 

The details (names and places) mentioned in this email you are about to read have been changed in order to protect the interests of both myself and my former wife.  Although the story I'm going to share with you may seem outlandish and at times would be hard for any reasonable person to believe, it's most certainly true. This is my account of my 14 year relationship with my former spouse/wife who struggled with addiction to the detriment of our wonderful future together.  This is an account of everything I can remember, how our relationship started, the first drink she ever took and the eventual 5-7 breakups prior to our divorce as well as the 7-9 breakups (15 total heartbreaking separations) after our divorce and the final ending of our relationship on Jan 1, 2024.

 

 

My wife and I worked in healthcare and began dating after working with one another for about 2 years.  I actively pursued her by stopping, talking and eventually asking her out on a date around Christmas in 2010.  I somehow knew, from the first time I spoke to her, that she was the woman that I was going to marry.  She was 22 at this time and I was 32.  She and I hit it off right away. She was a beautiful young lady, quiet, petite, helpful and very faithful to her church beliefs.  She was brought up in a home that valued Christ and her values were impeccable, contrary to my wild days of hanging out in clubs, bars and concerts.  Although I worked in healthcare, I always kept a part time gig going, playing music in local bars and restaurants.  To make a long story short, she was the innocent sweetheart and I was the guitar picking center of attention. 

 

Time went on and my wife went back to school to achieve her doctorate, while I supported her for around 3 years in a long distance relationship (about 2 hours away).  We'd talk every night and I'd see her on the weekends, which stopped my "bar fun" and sent me spiraling in love with this woman that I knew I would marry someday.  I proposed to her in my back yard covered in dirt from my head to my toes with a ring in a box that had been in my pocket for so long that it was completely falling apart.   

 

Needless to say, I was scared to death!  

 

We were married after about 3 and 1/2 years of dating at the age of 25 and 35 respectively.   She was my everything and I was hers, even through the subsequent troubles I know both of us felt this way about one another.  

 

 

 

Prior to our dating, my wife had never drank.  Not even a drop of alcohol, drugs or anything of the sort.  She didn't go out and "party" in college like most young people.  She worked her entire undergrad as a waitress and put herself through college completely debt free.  I say this because that work ethic and drive is important later on in this story.  So, she'd never had a drink, and I found that totally foreign and simply odd.  She told me one night after a glass of wine; "Oh, this isn't what I thought it was going to be, I just never drank because I didn't want to lose control of myself"....I reassured her that having a drink now and then didn't mean she would lose control or that she was a bad person.

 

 

Almost nightly we'd have a glass of red wine together with dinner, she'd fall asleep on the couch as I watched TV until it was time to hit the bed.  But this changed, and I really didn't notice because the change was so subtle.  The glass of wine with dinner became 2 glasses for her...then on to a bottle between us.  If I'd only known what was happening then, I feel like we could have stopped and the pain that was about to ensue would have never happened.   She was right about losing control, and I didn't know that her mother had struggled with an alcohol addiction problem that caused serious personality changes in her with just one drink.  

 

My wife and I started to develop some growing pains with our marriage. We struggled with communication skills and our belief about finances.  She was a "saver" and I was the "spender"....however I don't think she fully grasped the cost of home ownership and general life expenses.  She'd moved into my home and had never really spent any money since she started working at age 14.  With poor communication and financial concerns, as well as a mounting alcohol consumption issue, I asked her to join me in marriage counseling to help us both find a better way to communicate. 

 

 

 I knew that her sister had struggled with mental illness and she'd actually committed suicide early in our relationship.  My wife never really spoke of her sister with the acceptation of growing up in a house where her parents had to lock her sister up in her room and keep all knives and or weapons locked away from her sister.  Little did I know that these skeletons were in my wife's closet and she was not coping healthily with them. Her sister's mental illness had contributed to her mother's alcohol abuse and subsequent divorce from her father.   I discovered that my wife had some serious coping mechanism issues and basically buried her emotions deep within herself, until she discovered the freedom that alcohol consumption brought her.    She refused to go to counseling with me because of the childhood memories of family counseling and the perception of the ineffectiveness of this family counseling.   She simply didn't know how to cope, had a mental health history and an addiction history in within her home that she'd never shared.

 

 

 

 My little wonderful, beautiful and sweet wife started changing.  With every passing day she'd find herself more and more buried in her work.  She'd work 50-65 hours a week to cope with our communication issues and her perceived "over spending" in our home.  By the way our home was 100% paid for and we were totally debt free living in an 80,000 house.  Our combined incomes were over $280,000 per year.  There was no financial problem what so ever.  She began having a couple glasses of red wine per night and after the first glass, she'd start crying.  She'd stopped talking to me, stopped watching TV with me in the evenings and would go back to the bedroom and simply cry.  Nightly I would go back to console her, as a father would console his daughter.  I still didn't see that this was alcohol.  I was so blind by the perception that I had of alcohol as just something fun, recreational and that it had never affected me this way.   I didn't know it was the alcohol, I simply thought there were coping mechanisms and that she needed to get these tears out and share her feelings.  The only time she would really open up to me was when she was crying herself to sleep almost nightly.

 

I insisted that we both go to counseling together and she still adamantly refused, as if it was admitting weaknesses that she wasn't prepared to admit.  I didn't know what to do, or how to deal with this.  Had I know that alcohol was contributing to her mental and physical health decline, I would have insisted on intervening.  I just thought this was what it was like to be married to a younger woman who was very sheltered.  All along this was alcohol accentuating a mental health problem that I simply didn't understand.

 

I blamed myself, I thought I could do better and that maybe I was pushing too hard.  I talked to friends, family and collogues for months about the struggles and nobody could give me any sound advice.  I'd do my best for her, and she'd cry herself to sleep every night.  I'd talk with her and hold her, and she'd go right back into the same depression nearly every night.  At first this was only with me, but as we developed friendships with other couples, she started to suffer this way around them.  I never put two and two together that this could be alcoholism.....I ask myself every day "why?"  Even to this day I wonder why I couldn't see it!  So sad and so much blame I placed on myself, thinking maybe I didn't know how to live with someone, or that I was mean or cruel in some way that she couldn't handle.

 

 

 

Coming Out of Denial 

We had some friends over from out of town.  As a joke, we were all out on the porch having beers and she was having wine.  We we're just young couples being silly and telling stories by the fire pit, totally harmless, but as I look back I realized what we did that night opened Pandora's box and that it would never close again. We decided that we were just gonna get DRUNK!  Much like any other group of young people hanging in the back yard, drinking, telling lies and jamming on some music.  My wife drank a full bottle of wine that night, and a couple high ball liquor drinks.  She got wasted!  Totally wasted and dropped a wine glass, which sent her into a panicked frenzy of tears, apologies and simply inappropriate coping for a $2 wine glass.  She began sobbing uncontrollably, went in the bathroom and threw up, then went to the bedroom and cried herself to sleep.  There was no consoling her, there was no changing her mind and she could no longer be social.  She woke the next morning without any memory of this happening.

 

Fast forward 5 years:

 

For the next 5 years there wasn't a week that went by where she didn't drink and cry herself to sleep.  We'd moved out of town and bought a farm at this point.  The spending had increased dramatically and this really stressed her out.  She was still working nearly 70 hours a week with a 2 hour round trip drive to work every day, so she was never home, when she was home she was so exhausted she simply would have a glass or two of wine and sleep.  

 

One day out of the clear blue sky she started throwing a fit in the house.  She packed up a bag, shoved about 90% of her personal belongings in her car and was leaving me.  Something was a miss here.....she had a strange look in her eyes that I had never seen.  All I could do was ask here what was wrong, where she was going and why.  I asked her to go in the bathroom with me and look at herself in the mirror.   I told her something wasn't right, please don't do this to us.   I loved her, I still love her and she was my everything.  She bashed the walls of the inside of our little house, dented our front door, got in her car and left in a tearful rage.   I know now that she was drinking and hiding it from me.   She had began drinking and hiding the containers all over the house.  When she left that day I found alcohol containers in bags, closets, cabinets and simply all over the home.    I had no idea that she'd been sneaking and drinking to cope with life.  Alcohol was her only way out and was finally telling her to get out.

 

She returned the next day and apologized, I took her back with a very weary heart.  I'd been abandoned by the woman that I loved more than anything in this world.  She'd turned on me and all I could do is blame myself.  I couldn't get past blaming myself, thinking that I'd pushed her to this mechanism of coping, and that I needed to fix myself so she would stay and we'd get through all this.  She still refused counseling at this point and things just got worse.

 

I started talking to a counselor at this point and started studying addiction and listening to other's stories on the web.  They virtually mirrored my story in some cases.  She'd fallen prey to addiction and I knew this was something we would struggle with forever.  I wanted to make it work and would do anything that it took to get our lives back on track.  

 

Months went by, we talked together out on our gator around the farm.  We were best friends again and we talked about my childhood and living with an alcoholic father.  His abusive nature when I was a child.  We talked about the unpredictability and she agreed that she'd never drink again, and I would be by her side.   A week later she was drunk falling all over the walls, crying and screaming in the house.   I'd had enough, I asked her to go to counseling with me and she refused once again.  After several weeks of the "crazy cycle", I made the most horrible decision I'd ever had to make, I asked her to leave until she could get her life on track, get a handle on this addiction and we'd work together.   We went to counseling, we'd get back together, she'd come home drunk, drink in the shower/bathroom, hide bottles all over the place and even began stopping on her way home from work and drinking in gas station parking lots.   

 

 

 

We divorced after several separations and many many counseling sessions for which she said "ya'll are picking on me, you're making me out to be in the wrong" and it was the truth.  I still loved her, and still do love her to this day.  After our divorce she began going to AA and went to counseling weekly to help herself.  She'd finally admitted the problem and was working on herself.  I loved her so much and was so proud of her that I took her back again......only to have relapse after relapse.  I set boundaries in our relationship, that not one drink would be tolerated in our home, that she'd have counseling and that I'd go with her to counseling and AA if she'd let me.  She never let me go with her, she simply would have relapse after relapse....and with every drunken relapse I would send her away.   She'd be great for a week, then be drunk and mean again.  It would last for a month, maybe 6 months...then back to the bottle again.    I could no longer blame myself when she told me one day, while she was sober, that "you are the reason I'm going to AA" she said "I'm doing this crap for you".   

 

That's when I knew that this would end, and that no matter what....there was nothing I could do to help someone who couldn't or wouldn't help herself.   On Dec 31st 2023 she was off work, went to the gym and I asked her to grab us some greens and black eyed peas for new years day.   She stopped at the local Walmart, got drunk in the parking lot, walked through the door of our home and fell flat on her face drunk.  

 

The years of this had brought a lot of turmoil on my family, both my mother and my father had tried to guide me and help me through this.  My mother, having been married to an abusive alcoholic man, placed a lot of the blame on me.  She would tell me that I was being too hard on my wife, that I needed to ease up, that it was me pushing her to this apparent breaking point.   That last night (New Years Eve 2023) my mom talked with her on the phone for an hour as I hid every weapon in the house to keep my wife from hurting me.  It was the first time I felt fear, I knew she had to go.   She got off the phone with my mother and even though I'd told mom that my wife was drunk and out of her mind....mom continued to tell me that my wife just feared me, that she was not drunk and that she promised.   I'd heard these lies before so I begged my mother and step father to come get her before she hurt me or herself.  My wife was in the closet attempting to put everything she owned in garbage bags....I turned the phone on facetime to reveal my wife's glowing red face, bloodshot eyes and stumbling aimlessly through the house.   

 

Mom immediately told me she'd be there in 10 mins and took my wife away.  My wife continued denying all evening that she'd been drinking.  When I went to pick her up the next morning she acted like nothing happened. We had a final breakfast with my parents, my wife denied drinking all the way home until we pulled in the driveway, she then admitted to drinking wine in the Walmart parking lot and tossing the bottles in the trash can there.  

 

Jan 1st 2024 She left my life, never to return again.  Such a sad waste of 14 years of my life.  I learned so much from this experience and if I could tell anyone what I learned it would be to get help early, recognize the problem before it's too late.....and that alcohol is the most horrible life destroying substance out there.  Alcoholism can strike anyone, at anytime.  An alcoholic cannot help it, but they can control it.  The decision to drink comes when they are sober, if they could help it, they'd never destroy their lives like this.  Alcoholism is for life, a person with alcoholism will always be an alcoholic...whether they have a drink in their hand or a drink is sitting on a shelf at the store.  

 

 

 

She still drinks, she still tries to contact me and I still worry and pray that she gets better and simply gets this under control.   It's not her fault, and it's not my fault......it's just a horrible disease that changes the way the brain works.   The brain of an alcoholic will always crave alcohol and the alcoholic has to change their lives in their own time.   I just couldn't destroy my life trying to change her mind.

 

Thank you for hearing this story, I sure hope it helps someone.  This has been the most horrible struggle of my life, I'm healing and have met a wonderful woman.  I still love my former wife, but it's not the same anymore.  Nobody knows pain like the spouse of an alcoholic.