That point has already been made repeatedly. I see no point in making it yet again, ad nauseum.
Al-anon is an appropriate recommendation for anyone who is affected by someone else’s drinking. And I know of many people who began in Al-anon and went on to get involved in AA.
If she’s in jail, how heavy a lift is it for you to make sure she gets to AA? Don’t the groups go to the jail? What will you all do when she comes home? She has to be the one to get herself there. I second the suggestions of both AA and Al-Anon for you. You can go to both.
It’s hard for me to imagine how this particular situation could manifest for a guy your age. But look at the bright side: You learned alot about how things can go wrong with alcohol and dishonesty.
Rik, you did some soul-searching in this thread, but this is the part I want you to look at. Fact is, you’re an asshole too, just maybe a different kind of asshole. Not to beat you up. Everybody’s a bit of an asshole, some more than others. And with your personal issues, you’ve got to realize that while you’re not 100% asshole, you’re still well over 50%. So your goal here is to dial that down to below 50%.
The problem is that you’d only be able to do that by making some pretty major changes in your life. And you probably are pretty comfortable in the zone you’re in now. So making some drastic changes would be scary and disturbing to you, and it would mean the people around you–like your wife–who are comfortable with the asshole version of you, are going to resent those changes.
Point is, realizing that you’re an asshole is the first step in dialing it down. But if you insist that you’re one of the good ones, you’re never going to change.
IIRC, he chose to stay out of the dating pool for about two decades due to ignorance on the nature of his STD. So that usual big relationship or dating period we have in our 20s, 30s and 40s he skipped and now has a less mature level of relationship understanding in the body of a much older man w/ fewer dating options available for an age group more appropriate than 20-somethings (though he still pines for the younger group while settling for the older one).
It’s like Billy Madison meets Women Are From Mars but darker.
Good point. I only hope the OP takes your advice.
bolding mine
Speaking as a Christian and someone who struggles with disordered eating, value yourself! You’re made in the image and likeness of God and He loves you. I agree we should live by the will of God and not our own selfish desires, but that doesn’t mean not valuing ourselves! Only by loving God and yourself can you understand loving other people.
Man, if I was your sister and read the bolded part, I’d take that car back even if you were currently driving it. What a nice left handed compliment.
Adding on to this, Al-anon is not really well understood. They really focus on changing yourself.
I’m not sure which term is funnier; “functional alcoholic” or “skee daddled.” You have to get some laughter out of thios sort of thing somehow.
Having said that, I did learn something; I didn’t realize Al-anon was different from AA. Honest to God, I just assumed “Al-anon” was another abbreviation of “Alcoholics Anonymous.”
W/ a heaping helping of presumed moral high ground.
Yep. Who does his sister think she is, putting a condition on the loan that the unlicensed drunk who was going the wrong way on a one way street isn’t allowed to drive it? The nerve!
New to reading the Mister Rik sagas but reading this thread not so sure he can save himself.
QtM, more power to you being able to work with this sort of population. I’d rather bang my head against a wall. Not that I could tell the difference.
I’ve learned to better accept people where they’re at, tell them the facts I think they need to know, and be really sure to not get invested in any particular outcome.
It also helps to realize that as they are, I once was. And could be like that again.
You have my deepest respect and admiration.
I am grateful the field has people like you in it. I hope your patients are too.
The praise of the praiseworthy is above all rewards. 
I’m not religious, but I can’t think of anything to say to that besides “bless you”. Really, thank you.
If that’s what I was doing, it was subconscious. Something for me to work on, I suppose. I’ll remind you, and everybody else that, for the majority of my adult life, I’ve consciously chosen to keep myself mostly “separate” from “social life”, for a variety of reasons. One major reason is that I tend to completely panic in social situations, to the point where, if I find myself forced into conversation, I don’t know what to do and end up saying or doing something completely stupid. And I realize that that has put me into a place where I work things out for myself in what is, to me, a perfectly logical manner, and ends up sending completely the wrong message to others. I’m the guy who all of the neighbors (including my wife before we hooked up) see as “that weirdo who never comes out of his apartment”.
I may cling to my faith, but I’ve spent decades trying to shed what my faith tried to make me, and trying to separate what God says from what humans say. When I was a teenager in the 1980s, it was basically “everything you find entertaining is Satan trying to tempt you away from God”. The 1990s and the Internet led to me learning how much of what I was taught in the 1980s was urban legend or otherwise nonsense. And being a Doper for almost 14 years now has resulted in personal changes that might surprise you. When I joined this board in 2003, I was a diehard conservative and one of my earliest, most ignorant threads reeked of homophobia. 13+ years of the SDMB later, I’m far more liberal in my attitudes, to the point that I was proud to post about my 15-year-old niece now being my trans nephew.
That’s something only time will tell.
I’m basing some of my thoughts on my one conversation with her 30-year-old son. Who has obviously known her for much longer than I have. According to him, I am like the sixth “stepfather” he’s had (some of those were just “mom’s boyfriend”; she hasn’t been married 7 times), and so he had no interest in trying to establish a relationship with me. From what he told me, I don’t blame him for that attitude. He fully acknowledged his mom’s alcoholism, but also made it pretty clear that his previous “stepfathers” were abusive assholes. I didn’t push it.
I’ve stopped drinking entirely. She gave me “permission” to stop off and have a drink after work at a bar, but I was all, “Yeah, but it’s gonna be on my breath”, so I just stopped.
Not attending AA meetings with her … the main reason is that she chose a women-only AA group to attend, as she felt that was the best choice for her. I also think that’s a good choice, because I desperately want her to make some female friends who can have fun without drinking. I’m simultaneously trying to encourage the women at my church to befriend her, but one of the main problems there is that the most friendly, joyfully-willing-to-be-helpful woman in my church unfortunately happens to be that 15-years-my-junior woman for whom I carried a torch for way too long. She’s been great in the capacity of befriending my wife, and if she has any idea about the feelings I had for her, she’s doing as good a job of hiding it as I hope I did of hiding it for the last 20 years.
She desperately wants to stop drinking, and she has not had a drink since the incident. (Yes, I say “incident”, not “accident”. My dad, the cop, always said, “accidents don’t ‘happen’, they’re caused”).
I confess to being an enabler. But it was enabling out of desperation and not wanting anybody to get hurt. What do you do when your drunk wife is begging for more beer? I don’t know if you’ve ever had to actually deal with such a situation (maybe you have, but you didn’t say). My wife would be drunk, having been drinking all day and night, but now she’s run out, and wants me to go buy more. So I tell her no, no, and again no. And the sad fact is that, at some point, I have to fucking sleep. I had already taken to hiding the car keys in the toes of my shoes, where she couldn’t find them while I was asleep. So, if I wouldn’t drive to the store, she’d wait until I was asleep and then walk her ass to the store (she has her own money from her disability check, over which I have no control) and I would be damned if I was going to let her go stumbling up the street to the store, so I would fucking finally agree to run to the store to get enough beer to at least keep her safely at home where she wasn’t going to wobble into traffic. Fully fucking hating myself the whole time.
Some of you here, I think, honestly do not understand the difference between that, and a “functional alcoholic”.
I intend to. But not the same meetings as my wife. Aside from the fact that she’s attending women-only meetings, I just think it best that we don’t attend the same meetings. If you need to bitch about your partner, it’s easier if your partner isn’t standing right there.
Erm, she’s in jail on the opposite side of the state from where we live. She promised me she would attend the jail AA meetings while she’s there. When she’s back home, it’s a 10-minute drive to her meetings. Not sure what you’re getting at.
Thanks, you have actually accurately stated one of my personal problems. I’ll add that I spent my entire 30s living in a men’s homeless shelter.
I wish you only the best and hope it works out for you as a couple.
When I was 8yo, I vomited on my priest during my First Communion and never touched alcohol since.
Threads like this make me realize that day was a good day. Master Rik, my blessings.