I (28F) am considering breaking up with my fiancé (35M) who I’ve been with for almost 10 years and engaged to for 5. I love him with everything in me and I’ve never even been tempted to be with any one else during our entire relationship nor has he. We are echothers best friends. Love and loyalty has never been an issue for us, our main issue has been with alcohol.. He’s mostly 100% sober besides the few times a year (4 or 5) he goes on binges and will stay drunk for about a week straight. He’s had issues with alcohol since the beginning of our relationship, I first started picking up on things about a year into us dating. Despite his issues with drinking, he has always stayed passionate about his career goals and doing something amazing with his life. He’s gone from making 30K a year to now having a net worth of over 500K so that just goes to show that when he’s sober he’s intelligent, highly productive, and gets shit done to progress our lives together. But when he’s under the influence he’s quite different..he communicates aggressively, becomes impulsive, selfish ect. Just not the man I know and love. He’s never gotten physical with me or anything, it’s not like that. But it’s like when he’s in that state of mind, nothing matters to him including me. He’s even dropped the ball badly a few times with work that he had to admit to his colleagues that he had a bit of an issue with alcohol and intends on living a sober lifestyle. Which he would for about 3 months then fall of the wagon again. I’m tired of this cycle, but he doesn’t think he needs real treatment because ultimately he always is the one to get himself back on track. I love him so much but I’ve also given him soo many chances and can’t keep dealing with his highs and lows… TL;DR all I want is for him to be honest with me when he’s thinking about having a drink so we can possibly get ahead of things before shit gets bad. Instead he never tells me and will drink behind my back until eventually it leads to a binge where he’s drinking as much as he wants and not hiding it anymore. Should I break up with him or continue to be patient since overall this is an addiction that hasn’t been properly been treated? I’m so conflicted.
3 comments
The only thing I can say is try to get his ass into therapy or a support group and if that doesn’t work and you have no more options consider splitting, you can only be in a relationship like this for so long without falling apart yourself
In a terribly similar situation. It’s so hard when you have such a strong connection to someone. Idk what to do either. No advice, just validation and internet love your way
my father was like this except his binges stretched for months and he was violent (edit: physically, verbally, and emotionally which he isn’t when sober. It’s like night and day)… it did not end well for our family and took us decades to recover from the damage he caused.
Not sure if you need to break up, but if you’re already contemplating it, no one can force you to stay, because unless he volunteers himself or even open to some kind of intervention, this can’t be fixed.