at fault
my husband's sobriety ended our marriage; i'm as much to blame as he is
I’ve had a lot of time to just sit and think about things. I was in the hospital for a week and I am currently recuperating at home, free from the constraints of work and commuting and being exhausted. So I’ve been thinking a lot. About life, about death, about the frailty of our bodies, about love and loss and my divorce. I’ve been wanting to write, but found it hard while being in pain, but sometimes a thought just grabs you and won’t let go. I had one such thought brewing in my mind for the last two weeks when I read an advice column by Max Collins - the guy from Eve 6, who is very good at giving advice - and it coincided with what I had been turning around in my brain.
I’d been ruminating on the end of my marriage and how it seemed so sudden and abrupt to me at the time but in retrospect was a very slow moving catastrophe happening right in front of me. It moved too slow for me to perceive it at the time, and only through the gift of hindsight can I see what was really happening the whole time.
My ex husband (that still feels weird to write out) is a recovering alcoholic. He’ll be sober six years in August; I applaud him for that. But his recovery and sobriety took a toll on our marriage in much the same way his drinking did. When I read Max’s words yesterday, it all started to make sense to me:
Some people stop drinking and their problems stop with it: They sleep well, they feel great, the light comes on behind their eyes. That wasn’t me. It took me a long time to get to even an approximation of comfortable.
I had used alcohol and drugs to treat some pretty severe mental disorders, which now leapt upon me like starved wolves, and I no longer had recourse to blot them from my consciousness. I had to sit with and learn to negotiate a mind that was often attacking me. Gone was the spontaneous, carefree rock guy my partner had chosen, and in his place was a pensive, anxiety-addled wreck. A walking open nerve. The opposite of fun.
I started to look back on my ex’s road to sobriety and what came after with a new understanding of what he was going through, and what I had been ignoring. I want to refrain from laying the blame on myself because it was not solely on me that our marriage failed, but I do want to own up to not recognizing the trauma he was going through as he traveled that road.
I thought once he got sober things would be better; the clouds would part, the sun would shine on us again, everything would go back to being the way it was when we first met and he was newly sober for the first time. We had fun then. We traveled, we went on wild adventures, we enjoyed each other’s company. When he started drinking again things of course went south and we had some really tough times. But we also still had good times because he was uninhibited. He was a fun drunk, even as the alcohol was attempting to kill him. I knew that his drinking was bad, but I also knew that I would play no role in getting him to quit. He had to come to that path on his own. Eventually, after several health scares, he did. I was elated. Things would be ok. Our marriage would survive his drinking. I just didn’t know it wouldn’t survive his sobriety.
He took to AA immediately, and - I’ve written about this before - it became his life. I rarely saw him anymore. Morning meeting before work, meeting after work, and the meetings stretched into social gatherings at the diner and I was left alone. As such, I didn’t really get a chance to see just how sobriety was affecting him. I didn’t notice his depression creeping in, his anxiety taking hold, mostly because I had my own depression and anxiety to deal with in the midst of a pandemic, but also because our quality time together waned. I take responsibility for this, for not recognizing the signs while I was paying too much attention to my own, for not realizing he was failing at maintaining emotional balance while being successful at maintaining sobriety. The alcohol had masked his mental health problems. Now without that to buoy his well being, to prop up his confidence, to make it seem like he was this charismatic being, he was flailing and I didn’t see it. I just saw this guy who went and spoke at AA meetings, who was making all kinds of new friends, who was having a social life that I resented greatly.
I think it’s partly on him that he did not speak to me about it, did not voice his concerns about his own well being. But it’s on me, too, for expecting him to continue to be this fun, adventure seeking guy when he was grappling with his demons - demons that had become more pronounced since he didn’t have beer and vodka to keep them at bay.
I wish I had pried more into his psyche. I wish I asked him to open up more. I wish I recognized the depression and anxiety in him that I recognized so well in myself at the time. Maybe we could have talked it out. Maybe we would still be divorced but each of us with a better understanding of how we got there.
From that same advice column:
She told me I was an alcoholic. She told me I needed to stop drinking. She was right — I was, and I did. But I don’t think she was prepared for the completely different person I would become or how many aspects of my personality that she enjoyed weren’t actually traits of mine but the synthetic effects of alcohol in my bloodstream. Put simply, I stopped being “fun.”
Like Max’s partner, I was definitely not prepared for what came next. In my defense, there was no way to prepare. I didn’t know what was going on in his head while he was drinking, and I was not privy to what was going on his head when he got sober. All I know is my marriage is gone, fourteen years together up in smoke just like that. But I am coming to terms with what made him leave, what drove him away. It wasn’t just an act of selfishness, but an act of self preservation. And who am I to stand in the way of that.
These are the things I’ve been thinking about while laid up at home. I want to think of other things. I want to think about the future and what it holds for me. But first, I must reckon with the past.