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Hi Rod
I appreciated your column in today’s Mercury about having and sustaining a relationship with an alcoholic.
I was married for 28 years. We met when we were both students. He was the life and soul of the party, whereas I am fairly shy, and so I was able to enjoy a great social life without much being demanded of me, as he took the limelight. We married after we had both graduated, moved away from our home towns, and by the time our second baby was born he was out drinking most nights, often returning home well after midnight. During my second stay at the maternity hospital, he didn’t even visit me every day as he was either hungover or drinking. Things deteriorated rapidly, and I didn’t have the courage to leave, so I stayed and mopped up the pieces of our social life whenever he was downright rude to people, or fell asleep in a drunken stupor during dinner parties.
Reasons to stay – only 4/4 is sufficient reason to stay:
1. You want to stay in the relationship and you want to be married.
2. You have a support network outside of your immediate family where you can talk about anything you want to talk about.
3. The alcoholic has admitted he or she has a problem with alcohol and appears motivated to be rid of the disease.
4. He or she is committed to a legitimate recovery program and is part of a community of men and women who are ardently engaged in managing and beating the disease.
Reasons to leave (1 out of 4 suffices):
1. You are exhausted with trying to keep life together and you no longer have the energy to sustain life for more than yourself and your children.
2. Your trust reserves are depleted and you no longer want to be married.
3. You are expected to lie for your spouse as a result of his or her drinking.
4. You are regularly subjected to abuse of any kind.
5. You and your children are subjected to excessive drinking and all that accompanies the life of a drunk.
“Please help me. My son (15) and I are fighting over a girl he wants to have as a girlfriend and I think he is too young to be seeing any girl. Now he says he will probably have to see her in secret. This is worrying me. We have always been very honest with each other and now I am sure he will be afraid to tell me the truth. By the way, he has no relationship with his father and it has always been just the two of us.”
1. Write short full sentences.
2. Greet your reader or readers.
3. Punctuate, capitalize, and use apostrophes accurately.
4. Resist using all capitals, abbreviations, and those ridiculous little faces and symbols.
5. Edit.
6. Acknowledge sources when using quotations.
7. Be polite and kind under all circumstances.
8. In the same manner that it is unwise to buy groceries when you are hungry, avoid writing and then sending what you have written when you are angry.
9. Purify your writing. There’s enough litter already. Your capacity to use foul or demeaning language is not worth displaying.
10. Write with the expectation that your writing will be read by more than your intended recipient or recipients.
11. Avoid repetition.
12. Not everything you think or feel deserves to be written.
“I’m in my mid-twenties. I dated for three years. Everyone thought we had the ‘perfect’ relationship. I lost a lot of people I thought were friends when we broke up. There were two reasons: things were starting to get more physical, and he wanted to get married. To marry him would mean being someone other than who I wanted to become. He’s a very at-home person. I want to go out in the world and travel and have adventures. It hurt him a lot when I broke up. It hurt me a lot too. He’s started texting and I’ve been ignoring them. I think I need to tell him he must leave me alone. Am I on the right track?”
Reasons to stay – only 4/4 is sufficient reason to stay:
1. You want to stay in the relationship and you want to be married.
2. You have a support network outside of your immediate family where you can talk about anything you want to talk about.
3. The alcoholic has admitted he or she has a problem with alcohol and appears motivated to be rid of the disease.
4. He or she is committed to a legitimate recovery program and is part of a community of men and women who are ardently engaged in managing and beating the disease.
Reasons to leave (1 out of 4 suffices):
1. You are exhausted with trying to keep life together and you no longer have the energy to sustain life for more than yourself and your children.
2. Your trust reserves are depleted and you no longer want to be married.
3. You are expected to lie for your spouse as a result of his or her drinking.
4. You are regularly subjected to abuse of any kind.
5. You and your children are subjected to excessive drinking and all that accompanies the life of a drunk.
“Please help me. My son (15) and I are fighting over a girl he wants to have as a girlfriend and I think he is too young to be seeing any girl. Now he says he will probably have to see her in secret. This is worrying me. We have always been very honest with each other and now I am sure he will be afraid to tell me the truth. By the way, he has no relationship with his father and it has always been just the two of us.”
Integrity – “oneness” – the capacity to be true first to yourself and true to others is another of your many super-human powers.
Men and women of (growing) integrity:
1. They live lives where day-to-day actions reflect deeply held values and beliefs.
2. They are who they say they are, and they are who they want to be.