Living with an Alcoholic

We’ll call him Dan. That wasn’t his real name, but he really was my Significant Other, and he really was an alcoholic. And he was no fun to live with when he was drunk…which was the first several years that we lived together.

Dan was sober when I met him, sober in the beginning of the relationship. By the time he started drinking again, I was in too deeply to want to get out. We lived together. Sober, he was quiet, actually shy. Drunk, he was voluble but also volatile. He hit me only twice, but it was twice too often. Sober, he was placid. Drunk, he was argumentative. “I’m the same person drunk as I am sober,” he protested, when I objected to his drinking.

No, he wasn’t.

He quit… for a while. When he started again — and it wasn’t long before he did — he drank on the sly. I remember the whiskey bottle he hid in the bucket in the laundry room. He thought I wouldn’t find it. Did he really think he could get up and wander into the laundry room six or 10 times an hour and not arouse my suspicions? And did he really think his personality remained unchanged after a few drinks, so that I wouldn’t catch on? He tried to put one over on me. I became the adversary. It totally changed the nature of our relationship.

He would stop at the bar on the way home from work. It was out in the open, by then, that he was drinking again. He couldn’t wait to get home and have a drink, so as soon as work was over, he headed to the nearest bar and had a few. Then, “fortified,” he’d come home and drink some more. He was loud, sloppy, and obnoxious.

I believe he was glad when he got fired from work. Now he could drink all day. Much of his unemployment money went for booze. He’d stay up till 2 in the morning (and keep me awake in the process), then sleep till 10, get up, and start drinking again.

But I’ll give him this much: When, one day, he made up his mind to quit, he quit… and, with the help of the alcohol recovery program at the VA, he stayed off the stuff till he died.

But he never did acknowledge what a beast he’d been to live with when he was drunk.