Spouse doesn't want sobriety

Try checking out Al-Anon. It has helped me so much and changed my way of thinking about the impact on me of the alcoholics in my life (past, present and probably future). I have drawn so much strength and courage from my home Al-Anon group. Good luck :two_hearts:

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Yes I know about trust issues, thanks to my father in-law. But is it bad of me to expect her to address/work on those issues as I work on mine. Won’t us both being better make it better?

It’s interesting to hear a male perspective on this. With my husband, his DOC is marijuana. I told him several times over the years to stop, but he just started hiding it from me instead which caused a lot of trust issues in our relationship. He gets drunk too sometimes, but he would much rather prefer getting high and hiding it. When we first got together it wasn’t as big of a deal to me either because that was before we had kids, and we both had bad problems with partying too hard on alocohol at the same time. Over the years, I started drinking less and went through bouts of not drinking at all during my pregnancies which brought all of the drug/alcohol abuse to the surface more. I saw the effects of what he was doing more and had time to reflect on how ridiculous I had gotten on the booze too. More recently, I had toned down my drinking a lot, but I would go into binges where I would clear an entire bottle alone. This is the first time I have been this serious about getting sober without being “forced” into sobriety due to a pregnancy. It’s hard to do it alone if your partner is not on the same page. It sounds like your wife is a normal drinker though if she doesn’t even finish a glass of wine - more power to her on that! I think at the end of the day, all we can do is to communicate to our partners that we want sobriety for ourselves, and hopefully those of us with partners that don’t care or want that for themselves will follow our lead eventually. As far as it not being as big of an issue for your wife in the beginning, I can tell you this from experience (my husband has said the exact same thing), it takes awhile to REALLY know somebody… and in the beginning of a relationship, everyone is putting on their rose colored glasss anyways, so we often dismiss things. In my case, we got married very soon into our relationship and I had my own problems with booze fogging up the glasses even more. But someday you wake up older and wiser and realize this is not what you want for yourself. You want health, sobriety, and happiness.

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My boyfriend still drinks when we are out, but never encourages me to drink and has been very supportive of me. He offers to not drink and I tell him it’s ok.

For me, I don’t believe in changing other people. It’s his life, not mine. I find that partners tend to lie in relationships when they have been backed into a corner and given restrictions and ultimatums.

The issue is, if you insist they don’t drink (and they want to) they will either:

A) lie about it and do it anyway.
B) stop, but resent you for it.
C) drink more than if you hadn’t said anything.

For me it isn’t a deal breaker, but I guess if it is for someone they might have to move on.

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Also, if you would like to know more about Al-Anon, feel free to PM me. I have been pretty engaged with it for the last 10 months or so. I am new to my own sobriety (22 days and just started going to AA), but coming from Al-Anon I feel has helped me so much to even allow me to get to this stage of honesty, compassion and serenity. :slight_smile:

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So interesting. The fact that people close to us with drinking/ drug problems are the last ones to help or support us because it holds a mirror up.

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