My Story (Pt. 2)

After school started in the fall of 1996 I met the boy who would become my husband and also the alcoholic that brought me to Al-anon. (Yet not for 11 more years) Of course with in a month and a half I was madly in love with him so when I found out that he had been lying to me, using drugs and drinking, I was already so stuck in the things can be changed pattern that I just fell right into trying to help him. I was the 4.0 student who had never been in trouble and he became my “project” although if you would have asked me at the time I would have told you that I stayed with him because I loved him and we were going to make it work. (Coincidentally that is the same answer that I would continue to give for the next 12 1/2 years)

In December he was sent to his first treatment facility and this was the first time in our relationship that I started focusing on sobriety days. My alcoholic was not working a program at the time so I was trying to work one for him. After a couple of months, I realized that his sobriety wasn't really sobriety and our relationship started falling apart. He would do something and I would swear this was the last chance. Next time I would leave. And then the next thing would happen and I would stay. Making some excuse, some reason I couldn't leave.

I even gave up the one thing I had been holding onto all this time just to try to keep him with me but it didn't work. We fought, we broke up, we got back together again, we fought some more, rinse and repeat.

By, my senior year it was time to pick a college. I had always wanted to be a lawyer and had every intention of going to law school but the colleges that I was looking at for my undergrad seemed so far away. I began making choices that would keep me closer to home so that I could hold onto my relationship instead of the choices that were necessarily best for my future.

It was also during my senior year that I started trying to “buy” his love. For some reason I thought if the gift was bigger and better he would love me more. I continued this trend throughout all of our dating years and even into our marriage. Almost nothing was out of reach and the gifts just kept getting more and more expensive and we kept getting more and more into debt.

Meanwhile, through all of this, my diary is filled with thoughts of I can't loose him. I have to do this so he doesn't leave, I need to focus on that. All the while, writing on the next page I can't do this any more. I want to leave but I can't, when is enough enough, etc.

My trying to control him started that first year of our relationship. By some time in college I remember that my controlling went horribly wrong. He moved into an apartment with me and a friend of mine and I was trying to keep him from going out with friends. We got into an argument, I tried to take his keys and it got physical. No punches were thrown but there was plenty of pushing and the police were called. It was a this point that he was charged with his first domestic and he moved out.

Eventually, through some lying on my part, the charges were dropped and within a couple of months we were back together again however we continued to argue and fight and things continued to be somewhat physical. I was willing to let a man do just about anything to me as long as he didn't leave me.

A year or so later we were still together but no longer living together when when I found out I had gotten an STD from him. We broke up again but we never really severed ties. I still spoke to him on the phone once a week and we even tried to rectify our relationship a couple of times. It didn't work and we ended up broken up for the longest stretch in our relationship, about four or five months. During that time, I tried to date other people but inevitably ended up still talking about my alcoholic. Since I was still “in love” with him, sometime in March of the following year we got back together.

At the time I thought he was using but I didn't have anything to prove it so I decided that if I couldn't prove it he must be straight. Instead of trusting my gut instinct I stuffed it down and tried to justify what was in front of me. Until, of course, justification was no longer possible.

I was working as an intern when I got a call from his Grandma. She was very distraught as she told me he had been arrested the previous night. The arrest was a big one and we were pretty convinced that he might have to serve some jail time, especially when there was one more arrest over the summer. Finally, towards the fall it seemed like things started moving in a positive direction. He started working steadily and we decided after I graduated we would move in together. My theory on this was that it was his home life that was making him act the way he was. If I moved in with him then he would be with me and we would be happy and then he would want to stay home instead of going out all the time.