How I got my wife to quit drinking...
... and wound up divorced, anyway.
I didn’t know I married an alcoholic.
There’s no history of alcoholism in my family. My parents barely drank at all, and neither did I until I was well past the legal drinking age of 21 years old.
So I didn’t have the experience I needed to recognize the warnings, and by the time it should have been obvious, I was so deeply invested in my denial that I didn’t want to know.
My daughter changed all that, when she was 14 years old.
I was grocery shopping with her and my son (16 at the time) and she said, “Don’t buy the wine, Dad.”
“But,” I said. “If I don’t buy the cheap wine, your Mom is just going to buy the more expensive stuff and it’s going to cost us all more money.”
“So what?” my Son said. “She’d have to get off the couch then, wouldn’t she?”
By that time, my wife was drinking every afternoon. She couldn’t pick the kids up after school sports because she’d “had a glass of wine.” Grocery shopping, driving, appointments… they were all becoming too much for her to bear.
“OK,” I told them. “No more wine.”
The embarrassment, shame, and humiliation I felt at my own stupidity was finally motivating me to make a change. Maybe that’s what negative emotions are for, anyway — to tell you that you need to do something different.
I’ve written before about what happened after I sobered up my wife in What I Learned After Al-Anon, and How Are You (It Doesn’t Matter) but I haven’t written about the difficult process of breaking my co-dependent relationship with her, leading her to sobriety, and the changes I made that probably saved her life.
This article describes the steps I took that eventually resulted in the most difficult and painful experiences of my life.
1. I Worked on Myself First
The Man my wife fell in love with was not the man she found herself married to, over 15 years later.
As a 29 year old groom, I was handsome, reasonably lean at 6ft tall and 195lbs, owned my own house, and I had good prospects.
By the age of 44 I weighed 250 lbs, had negative net worth, and had moved my wife and kids five times in 15 years.
It was time to admit that this wasn’t what my wife signed up for, and do something about it.
I sat her down and I said, “You’re going to see some changes in me.”
She asked, “Why are you telling me this?”
And all I could think to say was,
“Because we’re married. And when one person in a marriage starts making some changes, maybe the other one will get curious or concerned.
“I’m telling you so that you won’t be surprised when you see me eating better, working out, and dressing better.”
She was skeptical, of course, but that didn’t matter.
My goal at the time became turning myself into a Man she would consider worth sobering up for. Never mind that sobriety and alcoholism don’t really work that way. That is, nobody sobers up for someone else, and that wasn’t the point.
The point was that I knew I had lost credibility with my wife, because of the way I had let my own health, well-being, success, and appearance go down the tubes. And if I couldn’t get myself together, how could I ever expect her to?
So I asked my daughter to write out some exercises for me.
She got a sheet of paper and she wrote in big capital letters at the top:
FAT DADDY WORKOUT
And she proceeded to list descriptions of the various tortures I was paying some personal trainer to subject her to twice a week.
Bulgarian squats. Russian twists.
Have you ever noticed that things named after Eastern European countries are always painful exercises, and things named after western European countries are always delicious treats?
Which would you rather have, a Romanian Lift or a Belgian Curl?
My exercises were of the Eastern European variety, and I performed them dutifully every week under the supervision of my daughter until I’d gotten into halfway decent enough shape to attend some of the classes at our gym.
I tried tennis, weightlifting, and boxing, but something I remember as Cardio Ballet turned out to be my favorite. I was the only man in the class, the Instructor was the cutest little ballerina I could have ever imagined, and I went once a week for the next two years.
2. I Got Help From Others
It’s not possible for you to change your life with the knowledge you used to create it. You’re going to benefit from the experiences and wisdom of others.
Fortunately, there’s more help available than every before, and it breaks down into three broad categories: 1) Books, 2) Mentors, 3) Groups.
Books
Still one of the best ways to learn new things is to read (or listen) to old books. Although a lot of people like podcasts, I find them inefficient compared to non-fiction books.
I started listening to more than a hundred books a year — more than two a week — and to do it, I developed a system.
I would screen books by listening to them. Whenever I was in my car, or walking between meetings or classes on campus, I would listen to books on 1.8x speed.
The really, really good books I would get in hard copy, and re-read them on paper so I could make notes in the margins, add post-it notes and bookmarks, and circle poignant passages.
These are the really, really good ones.
No More Mr. Nice Guy by Robert Glover (2003) described how my efforts to be “nice” were creating covert contracts with my wife that killed her attraction and generated resentment in me. The problem with being a “nice guy,” according to Glover, is that in my imagination, I thought my wife would reciprocate my efforts to please her by trying to please me back — even without me having to ask. When that failed, I felt ripped off. Because in my imagination, my “nice” (like buying her wine?) behavior deserved some kind unstated recognition or reward. So the “nicer” I behaved, the more I cultivated in myself a sense of unfulfilled entitlement that must eventually become resentment. And, as John Gottman’s (1995) research demonstrated, no marriage can survive a resentment that evolves into contempt.
Married Man Sex Life by Athol Kay (2011) is a primer on how to become the kind of Man your wife wants to date. Written over a period of several years after Neil Strauss published The Game (2005) revealing pick-up artist culture and techniques, Kay applied the practical psychology of attraction to the problem of sexless marriages — which might lead you to believe the book was helpful to me because I wasn’t getting the sex I wanted in my marriage, even though that wasn’t the problem I was trying to solve. The more valuable aspects of the book were the description of Kay’s ideas on what a healthy marriage looks like. Because I didn’t have a healthy marriage, it was helpful for me to read Kay’s ideas on leadership, operant conditioning, and personal responsibility. The two most important things I learned from Kay were the concept called “critical moment of neglect” and the wisdom in a section called ‘Stop Tolerating the Intolerable.’
Co-dependent No More by Melody Beattie (1986) is a seminal treatise on the way we attempt to manage our own negative emotions by controlling other’s behaviors. What I came to realize from reading Beattie was that, although most people think of alcoholism as the problem, the fact is that my wife’s drinking was her attempt to find a solution. Her problem was the fear, anxiety, trauma, and sense of abandonment she carried with her from childhood. Many of the “nice” things I thought I was doing “for her,” such as respecting her autonomy and independence, were instead activating her fears of abandonment or being interpreted as neglect. Because those feelings were intolerable for her, and she didn’t know how to manage them, she numbed them with alcohol. In this sense, alcohol was a flawed solution to a deeper problem, and until I read Beattie I never would have thought of it this way. To quit drinking, my wife was going to need a better solution than alcohol, or she’d be left with all the negative emotions that she couldn’t live with in the first place.
Although most people think of alcoholism as the problem, the fact is that my wife’s drinking was her attempt to find a solution.
Mentors
Human beings are hard-wired to learn best by imitating what anthropologist Joseph Henrich, PhD (2015) call “prestigious models.” That means that we will find it easier to follow the examples set by other, more successful people, than to reasoning through our problems and find the solutions that work for us — which might be why leadership expert Jim Rohn says “You are the average of the five people closest to you.”
To tap into this powerful mode of gaining new knowledge, you’re going to need “prestigious models” that have grappled with problem analogous to yours, who are willing to share with you their experiences. For me, that meant talking about my problem with other men whom I admired in some aspect, to see if they had analogous experiences and wisdom to offer.
In particular, I found two.
Both suffered as child under the tyrannical alcoholism of their Mothers and had sought counseling and therapy and resolution of the trauma that resulted. Their wisdom was essential to help me sort out the effect of alcoholism on me and my children, and I made a rule for myself that I would try any piece of advice they gave me. Mind you, I didn’t have to follow the advice — I need only test it, to see if it worked for me.
Most of it did.
Groups
There were two important groups for me: 1) Men’s Group, and 2) Al-Anon. The Men’s Group was less structured and longer-lasting. It helped me gain multiple perspectives that improved my understanding what was real and what was my denial, and it helped that we were all reading many of the same books.
I only went to Al-Anon twice, but the effect was much more profound. The most important thing I learned from Al-Anon was that my wife was a brain-damaged drunk, and that asking her to function like a grown adult was unfair. One of the guys in Al-Anon told me, “Your wife stopped developing the day she started drinking. That might mean that she has the emotional maturity of a teenager, and serious brain damage on top of that. Now, here you are saying that you want to respect her opinions as a partner, when you already know her judgment is not to be trusted. Because she is an addict. Expecting her to behave like a grown up is cruel, and you are an asshole, because she is incapable of that right now, and she will only feel more shame and anger when she realizes she is unable to meet your unfair expectations.”
He was right.
The second most important thing I got from Al-Anon was this challenge from another member, who said,
“You’re going to have to find out what you are getting out of her drinking, and you’re going to have to cut yourself off from that thing, whether she stops drinking or not.”
I protested, of course. I explained that I couldn’t possibly be getting anything out of her drinking, because I wanted nothing more than for her to stop!
The Al-Anon guys told me that was bullshit.
They were right about that, too.
Sex was what I was getting out of her drinking. Part of the reason that sex “wasn’t a problem” in our marriage was because I could count on her to have sex with me whenever she was drinking, which was all the time. So it wasn’t that I was in a sexless marriage, but sex was part of the problem in our marriage.
3. I Made a Decision
Most people don’t understand what a decision is. They think that a decision is when you make up your mind, but it’s not.
A decision is when you make an irreversible commitment of resources. To decide requires you to incur opportunity costs. Real decisions are costly to break or back out of. And that’s why so many of us procrastinate about making real decisions.
For me, there were four critical decisions:
The first was that I would no longer hold my wife’s hair back while she puked her guts into the toilet. What I meant was that I would not “enable” my wife’s drinking by doing anything that makes it easier for her, or shields her from the consequences of her drinking.
That was the most difficult decision of my life.
To make that a decision, I had to be willing to make the commitment of resources. That did not require me to announce it to my wife, or anyone else, because that’s not a decision. An announcement is a political trial balloon, not a decision.
The commitment to my decision could only come when it I took an action that would be costly to reverse.
To prepare myself to break my codependence, I imagined leaving my wife to die in a dark alley, choking on her own vomit.
I still think that sounds awful and that I am a wretched human being for even imaging such a thing. (Thank goodness it never came to pass). Nonetheless, her drinking had confronted me with analogous choices in the past, and I knew I would have to prepare myself for the gut-wrenching anxiety that caused me to enable her them. So I rehearsed the most extreme abandonment of her I could conjure in my mind.The second decision was that I no longer wanted to be married to a drunk. That didn’t necessarily mean that I wanted a divorce. (I didn’t). What I wanted was to be married to a sober wife, whether that was her or some other woman.
I preferred her.The third decision was that I would stop drinking. No alcohol, anywhere.
That one was easy. I went a year without a drop of alcohol, which helped me get in shape and lose weight, and set a good example for my kids and for her.The fourth decision was that I would not have sex with her any time she was less than stone-cold sober.
On that, she tested me.
One evening, while I was in bed and she was already drunk, she stripped down to her nighty, climbed on top of me and offered me a deal.
She said, “I tell you what… you get me drunk, and I’ll fuck your brains out.”
I declined.
What I came to realize only later was that her only experiences of sex had been mixed with alcohol, because she started drinking years before she started having sex. And by the time sex came along, she used drinking to calm her nerves, to get into the mood, to release her inhibitions.
For her to become sober would required us to relearn sex as sober people. That turned out to be much more difficult than I’d thought. In particular, it required us to tell one another what we liked, what turned us one, and what didn’t work for us.
These conversations weren’t comfortable for me.
As I learned more about her sexual history, and about my own, I became embarrassed and insecure and ashamed of how little I knew about women and about myself. I discovered that I was afraid to ask for what I wanted — even from my own wife. And I discovered that even after 17 years of marriage, there were things about my wife that I never knew.
Chief among these was the discovery that she wanted me to be more assertive. Although this went against everything in the “nice guy” routine I had previously been convinced was the key to pleasing my wife, the conversations and experiments we shared after she sobered up helped disabuse me of my misconceptions.
I came to the conclusion that I had pretty much been a sexual disappointment to every woman I was ever in a serious relationship with, and that they had stuck it out with me despite their dissatisfaction.
That was a hard pill to swallow. And it brought me to a closer approximation of the Truth in a way that prepared me for a more satisfying sex life — whether that was going to be with her, or some other woman.
4. I Communicated My Decisions To Her
Making my decisions committed me to a future that was certain to be different from my past — a future that wasn’t going to happen by itself.
For my wife to be part of that future, she would have to make some decisions, too.
So I sat her back down for another talk. It had been about six months since the “You’re going to notice some changes in me” talk. That’s how long it took for me to read get myself in shape, read the books, go to the groups, find the mentors.. and have the confidence to have a difficult conversation.
I told her, “I’m no longer willing to be married to a drunk. You have two choices:
“Option A is to quit drinking, sober up, and get yourself into a program.
“Option B is divorce.
“There is no Option C.”
I presented her choices as an ultimatum. I didn’t see room for negotiation, which is why I explained that there was no Option C.
But I didn’t set a deadline.
So it made sense that her best “choice” was to procrastinate about making a choice. Still, she thought about it for a couple of days, we went out to dinner, and she told me that she was going to give up drinking. She wasn’t sure about going into a program, because she had some trepidation about the “God stuff” and anyway she wasn’t ready to say “I’m an alcoholic and all that.”
But she would stop drinking. And she did.
It was her sister who got her into the program, weeks later.
Because her older sister, and her older brother, were already in Alcoholics Anonymous and it was working well for them, her sister decided it might be a good time to come for a visit and invite my wife to an AA meeting.
It was a good meeting, so my wife chose to start with Option A.
5. I Took Care of My Own Needs
The problem with having a wife in a 12-step program that’s working for her is that she will be emotionally unavailable. Given the intensity of her recovery, she remained self-absorbed.
Addiction comes with many of the same characteristics as narcissism. Because the alcohol was my wife’s best friend, closest lover, most important companion, she had little energy left for me or our children. Everything about her life revolved around her addiction.
Getting sober offered some hope that she might eventually become less self-absorbed.
But not right away.
Going thru a 12-step program means lots of readings, lots of meetings, lots of meetings after the meetings, lots of phone calls, lots of writing, and lots of difficult conversations with a Sponsor. You might notice how the books, mentors, and groups that were essential to me were also present in her transformation.
What sobriety was not leaving a lot of room for in my wife’s life was me.
Which returns us to Athol Kay’s concept of “critical moments of neglect.” There are times in a marriage when one spouse will be or become unavailable or unable to meet the legitimate needs of the person they’re married to. During those periods (e.g., an extended business trip or overseas deployment) the spouse will be confronted with unmet needs, and that’s going to be a problem for the relationship.
For me, my wife’s sobriety created a critical unmet need for emotional intimacy with a woman. As part of my journey, I was waking up to so many new ideas, and one of them was the idea that I had a real need for sharing an emotional connection.
I’ve since traced the roots of that necessity back to my childhood, and I wrote about it in Why I Have Obsessive Thoughts and Why I Want My Woman on My Team, but at the time all I knew was that I was lonely for caring attention from women.
That emotional connection didn’t have to be with a woman to whom I was sexually attracted, because I was intensely invested in rebuilding my sexual relationship with my wife. So what I was working on instead is what you might call an emotional affair.
The trick to an emotional affair is finding a woman willing to be your confidant — your emotional sponge, so to speak — without the privilege of sleeping with you.
To do that, you have to look in two places: 1) long distance relationships, and 2) married woman.
I did both.
Well, the second wasn’t technically married. She was in a committed long term relationship with a man who was unwilling to marry her, and maybe that left her open to our relationship. But it did present certain complications.
To clarify what I was looking for, I drew her this graph:
I explained to her that my marriage was all about dopamine lust, because my wife was sexy as hell to me, but emotionally unavailable. By contrast, I was not sexually attracted to the object of my emotional affair, because my bonding to her was all about oxytocin.
She accepted that explanation and we continued to “date” for months — until her boyfriend woke up to the whole unworkability of this unusual love triangle of sorts and gave her an ultimatum: “Marry me, or else.”
So they’re married.
The long distance relationship broke apart when I was in her hometown for a conference and we agreed to meet.
It didn’t go well. Because I’d had such success with my dopamine/oxytocin graph, I gave that explanation again.
Except that this time, my confidant was not committed, not living with another man, and not interested in my graphical explanation of why I wasn’t going to have sex with her.
She offered her own ultimatum, “Sleep with me or I will break up with you.”
I declined.
The point is that sobering up my wife left me with critical unmet needs. You might judge me as morally inadequate for going outside my marriage to meet my emotional needs.
But it wasn’t that I didn’t bring those needs to my wife.
I tried.
And it wasn’t that she didn’t care. She was incapable, and for good reasons.
Going outside my marriage to get my needs met was a way of buying more time for my marriage to evolve into something that we both hoped would be worthwhile, without building in me the resentment that goes with legitimate unmet needs.
If that sounds like an excuse, then so be it. The fact remains that real needs must be met, and an incapacitated spouse that cannot meet that need within the marriage must because they’re going through addiction recovery must acknowledge the needs of their partner and be willing to cooperate in getting those needs met.
6. I Remained Unattached to the Outcome
My marriage ended on the sidewalk outside the marriage counselors office. My wife and I had just been through a difficult session with our third couples counselor, in which they had encouraged me to share my feelings.
I demurred.
But they both insisted. Counseling, they said, required both spouses to be forthcoming with their thought, feelings, and perceptions, and that it was a safe space to share.
So I talked about how I felt and disaster ensued,
“I want a divorce,” she said before we could even make it back to the to our minivan.
In her defense, I had trained her over the last 17 years that threatening divorce was an effective negotiating tactic by which she might gain some concessions from me — whatever those were. Her divorce threats were an annual occurrence, if not more often, and each time my “nice guy” routine would seek to discover the problem in my behavior and correct it.
Not this time.
As you can imagine, I had given the matter considerable thought. I had a plan for our finances, our living arrangements, our kids.
I even had another woman in mind to whom I was very attracted and was interested in dating.
So I said, “OK, then we will separate.”
I didn’t want a divorce. In fact, it took 4 more years before I was willing to allow a divorce.
But neither did I want to be in a marriage with someone who was threatening me with divorce.
My only regret in that moment was that when it came time for my wife and I to live in separate places, my son lived with me and I sent my daughter to live with her alcoholic mother.
I regret not giving my daughter a choice. I should have asked. I should have presented the plan as an merely an idea for her reaction, rather than a forgone conclusion.
I think she’s forgiven me, but the fact remains that I made a poor choice.
My point in saying, “Remain unattached to the outcome,” is that you cannot control what your alcoholic spouse is going to do. You can be influential, but you are not in control.
When they make choices that do not suit you, the best you will be able to do is adapt your own choices around theirs. Trying to coerce them to your will works against their sobriety. Moving your own boundaries to maintain the relationship will undermine everything you’ve been doing all this work to try and achieve.
In the long run, improving yourself first, seeking help, deciding, and communicating are going to create a better life for you, whether your spouse chooses to join you in that life or not.
I honestly think this is the best post that I have ever read on Substack.