Can Relationships & Marriages Survive Sobriety?

Prior to recovery my go-to modus operandi was react and run. Once I got sober I had to learn to switch gears. I had to learn to live the trite but true sayings like, feel and deal, and you don’t have to be tore up from the floor up before you make a change.

How in the hell do we stay sober in a boozy world? How do we maintain relationships and marriages with those who still drink? Can we? Should we?

Those are the sorts of questions that came to mind. I was four years into my marriage when I decided to get sober. As I point out in my book Raising the Bottom, the conversation when down like this:

I went home and told my husband my plan to quit drinking for good. He looked aghast. I was his best drinking buddy. He tried to talk me out of it and said things like, “I don’t think you’re an alcoholic you just need to learn how to control your emotions.” Well, guess what? I can’t deal with my emotions when I drink because alcohol affects me that way.

I told my husband I didn’t care what he thought. None of it mattered. What mattered was what I thought. I was resolute. I informed him that if he didn’t like my choice he could let himself out the door at any time. That shut him up. He knew I wasn’t playing.”

A hurdle for some women is that they fear if they get sober they will lose their spouse or SO in their life. If sobriety is to take hold, I believe that we have to let those fears go and do what we need to do to save ourselves. Any relationship that requires a death grip in order to hold onto is not a healthy relationship anyway.

Stay or Go?

Two weeks into my sobriety, I found out I was pregnant with twins. My pregnancy put a whole new spin on the question of should I stay or should I go? I will be forever grateful for the women who told me to slow down and give time time.

My husband didn’t quit drinking just because I did. At the time, we lived around all sorts of young families and they all drank. We had potlucks and picnics; we had Fourth of July parades where we’d gather all the kids in the neighborhood and they’d decorate their bikes while the adults looked on and drank wine or guzzled beer—except for me.

I was committed to wanting more from life than the next party, or the next drink, but that can be hard to do when alcohol is in your face at every turn—but for me, the drinking wasn’t so fun anymore. I felt like my life was stuck in quicksand and the emotional ups and downs that I started to have toggled between melodramatic and pathetic.

We Can Get Bitter or We Can Get Better

Once sober, I decided to go back to school since I had been in and out of college for ten years and hadn’t finished my degree. That right there was a good indication something was amiss in my life, but alcohol is always the last place anyone wants to look. Between my twins, school and my newfound sobriety, I had enough to keep me occupied. As the years slipped by, I’d be lying if I didn’t think the whole marriage business was not for me, but thank goodness, by this time I had some great women in my life. They taught me how to play the tape forward.

My husband was a wonderful father and a wonderful provider. My kids were thriving. Did I want to break up our family because my husband still drank and annoyed me? I decided that I would have to learn to live in a boozy world and I better find a way to do it and be at peace.

As the years passed my husband changed quite a bit and so did I. We had a five or six year’s span that was difficult, but here we are thirty-three years later; I’m still sober and we’re both happy and love that our family is still intact.

I’ve worked with many women in recovery and the question of should I stay or leave my marriage always seems to come up in the first few months of recovery. For some, the answer is to stay, and others it’s apparent that they need to leave. There is no wholly right or wrong answer because everyone’s circumstances are different, but recovery taught me to not react in haste. Recovery taught me to pray about a situation and ask for the best outcome for the good of all concerned. Recovery taught me that it’s no longer about me and I had to learn to look at the situation from a global perspective instead of a selfish perspective. I had to learn to get myself out of the way, and yes, for a number of years I decided that I’d take one for the team and let the marriage play out for a while longer rather than jump ship like a wanted to do on more than a few occasions.

It’s also imperative not to make a decision based on what I call the 3 F’s:

• Fear
• Finances
• Friends

But, I’m Pissed

Although I wanted to be sober, I was angry that everyone else got to drink. Thank goodness for the people in recovery who explained that it was okay to feel that way, for a minute, but if I stayed stuck in that anger I would probably drink again. Back in 1989, I stayed sober for three months, and because I was still pissed at the world, I drank—for a day. That one day relapse was enough, and then the light came on—I finally understood what those people in recovery had tried to tell me—that anger and resentment would take me back out every time. I couldn’t live in that space and I was either going to accept my alcoholism and do what I needed to do or I’d have to face the consequences of a boozy life, and who wants to be just another drunk girl?

I chose to go the sober route and as my life got better and better, I fell in love with sobriety. It was a gift to have a clear mind, self-respect, goals, and I loved being a sober mom. I’m grateful that my sons didn’t have to deal with a mother who had meltdowns or smelled like she spritzed herself in vodka. I’m glad they didn’t have to deal with the party mom who wasn’t done roaming the bars or who needed to sneak into the laundry room or walk-in closet to have a drink just to get through the rest of the afternoon. I was done being that girl who thought my friends were friends when the truth is they weren’t much more than drinking buddies. It was only when I got into recovery that I realized that real friends point us in the way of health, peace, and prosperity. Friends don’t encourage each other to destroy their life with alcohol.

it took me a year or more to come to the complete acceptance that I was an alcoholic because my bottom was high; it was mostly an internal crash that prompted me to get sober. From the outside looking in my life looked well put together. I loved my marketing job, I was married to a professional, I never had a DUI and never spent a night in jail. I think it was a gift that I was able to see what I needed to see when I saw it, or maybe God knew I would be one of those alcoholics who would’ve never made it had I waited. Addiction runs deep in our family and I’ve seen too many people wait too long, and as I point out in Raising the Bottom:

“Most dragged themselves and their families down before stopping. I didn’t want to be that person. I watched my mother completely destroy herself with alcohol, and it happened within a span of five years. There was no reason why I had to follow suit. I believed those lines [To be gravely affected, one does not necessarily have to drink a long time nor take the quantities some of us have. This is particularly true of women. Potential female alcoholics often turn into the real thing and are gone beyond recall in a few years.” AA p. 33] I’d heard because I lived it. I saw what happened to people who allowed their pride to step in the way. Sure, Mom started the whole ball rolling with prescription medication long before her drinking got out of control, but still, I knew her fate would be my fate. I saw firsthand how wrong things could go.”

Whether or not we stay in relationships and marriages isn’t so much the point as it is that when we’re sober we can make better choices. Alcoholism is a disease of perception, and it’s awful to make decisions when we have a skewed perception of reality. When we’re sober we don’t have to react—we get to respond. We can make adult decisions based on what’s best for the good of all concerned.

That sort of restraint didn’t come naturally to me, it was something I had to learn and I am grateful for all the teachers who told me to shut up, grow-up, and show-up; this business of living is infinitely gritty and wonderful, and the most important lesson of all that I learned is that life is much better when I can make it more about you than it is about me.

To my fearless teachers, and there have been many—bravo!