He has just cracked open bottle number 4

[Lablo]

DP is amazing, honestly in everyway. Apart from his drinking. Every single night. A couple of beers and then at least 2 bottles of red wine. I am working nights tonight and he is still up and has just opened bottle number 4, that’s insane. He is on A/L this week so doesn’t have work.

He is never aggressive or anything when drinking but obviously can barely talk and stumbles around. Yet when he is working he is up at 6:30 bright and breezy, popping his multi vitamins with a big glass of water in his shirt whistling off to work.

I have mentioned this before but he just says everyone likes a drink and he likes a bit more.

bottle number 4?! WTAF???

Bloody hell that is a lot. Completely apart from the fact that he is obviously an alcoholic, at some point this will physically become a problem. This amount of alcohol intake WILL kill him early OP. There is only so long the body can hold off the effects for.

@sawnotseen @WendyWagon Thanks for sharing your experiences.

I would consider a bottle of wine every night to be alcohol dependent. Add 2 beers and another bottle or 2, there is no question that he is an alcoholic.

Would he agree to go to the GP and talk it through, have some blood tests?

Four bottles on the same day? I'm surprised he's capable of movement after three.

If he does that or similar on a regular basis he's on the road to alcoholism if he's not actually there.

I feel for you. I never lived with my heavy-drinking x. But he was a great guy, funny, clever, crazy about me, never aggressive, good at his job. The ONLY fight we ever had was when he wouldn't answer the question ''do you drink every day?''. (we didn't see each other every day). I think I just knew then, ok so this is not going to work.

I think you can do a lot of the 'splitting' in your head before you have to have the conversation, so at least your explanations are more concise and more boundaried. And you've looked in tot he practicalities. Ykwim.

I used to fantasise about secretly administering suboxen (or whatever it's called) to my x! Lunacy. I think I googled if you could order it on line.

OP, that must be really worrying for you to watch. My uncle died of liver cirrhosis due to alcohol and I have a cousin who's currently terminally ill with a nightmare combination of cirrhosis and cancer.

A few years back I was heading down a dark path myself, drinking a bottle of wine a night and thinking I was 'ok' if I didn't drink one day a week. Denial is a very powerful force. I'm not even sure why I was drinking so much...boredom? Enjoyed the feeling? Always made me feel nicely relaxed before going to bed (even though I'd wake up in the wee hours with a headache and the sweats).

I can 100% see how it happens though. 1 bottle becomes 1.5 bottles and so on and as it increases you tell yourself you deserve it, that you work hard, that you can stop when you want to.

And then all of a sudden, with no warning, everything just goes a bit splat. For me I ended up in A&E with a dangerously high heart rate and BP, not helped by the nearly two bottles of red wine I'd just drunk. I think I could just suddenly see how my uncle and cousin had gotten to where they were and I did not want that horrendous life for myself.

Anyway, I don't think I was at alcoholic stage but I was well on my way. But the fear of God had been put into me and that gave me the push to get started. I got a drink tracking app and just started slowly tapering off.

I do still drink now but within my weekly units and I don't feel like it's got this hold over me in the same way. I think your DH needs a proper heart-to-heart or some kind of intervention as it sounds as though he thinks he'll just feel a bit rough and will then stop, but in truth he could end up having a life-changing medical issue which gives no warning. If he were to have an accident while driving and was found to be over the limit, he could lose his livelihood too. Not to worry you further but he's living a very risky life.

I'd really recommend a drinking tracking app (Drink Aware do one) and committing to religiously tracking every glass. He will probably be horrified when he sees just how much he's consuming. That little 'red - this is likely to be seriously damaging your health' indicator on the app was a massive help to me and many, many times stopped me from having 'one more small one'.

I hope you're able to have a honest chat with him.

Ah yes. Weaponising kids.

@sawnotseen ah bless you.

I am here to share if it helps anyone. It took me about a year to admit alcohol dependancy.
I did some funny things in my drunken youth but a 56 year old pearl wearing woman, pissed as a fart is not funny.
I went to AA (helpful, free and scary if you get a rough set). I cried through my first meeting.
Lots of quit lit out there. Blokes like Allan Carr books. There's also sober Dave podcasts.
I had six months therapy. £50 a go. I had spent that on booze. Turns out I wasn't the big cheese confident business person I thought I was. I was a scared kid of14 being bullied and more. I drank from that age.
You can recover and be around booze. I'm not really bothered. I say I can have the champers if I want it but no one is buying the good stuff these days so I manage on AF drinks.
Personally I am lucky my DH loved me enough to give me a chance.

He’s having at least 22 units a day. That’s 154 units a week.

That’s 1100% of the weekly recommended intake of alcohol.

I feel so incredibly ill thinking about that. The money, the enormous health implications and the fact that he drives…

So you have probably never seen him fully sober.

If a school night is two bottles of red plus the odd beer, weekends are more then he is never fully clearing the alcohol from his system. Consider also that as you get older the rate of processing gets slower - that "one unit per hour" is in young healthy adults, not middle aged problem drinkers.

As others have said - the functioning stage precedes the dysfunctional stage. He might go on for another five, ten or fifteen years drinking like this but at some point he will become a challenging care responsibility and not your partner.

What does he say when you talk about driving over the limit in the morning? He will be over the limit because of the volume he is drinking.

I'm sorry, OP.

Even after two bottles and stopping at 10pm I very much doubt he is under the limit to drive in the morning. A breathalyser might be a good idea, if only to show him that his drinking habits are not normal. If he refuses to take a breathalyser or drives anyway, I might be tempted to take the nuclear option and report him and his car registration to the police. A driving ban might be the wake up call he needs, or at the very least would hopefully keep him off the roads and less likely to kill a child on their way to school.

Just as a heads up, this thread is currently appearing in active.

And of course he won't lay off it when he is unwell - he will not be able to and he will blame anything except the drink for the health issues.

Ah yes. Being a judgemental ….

He s definitely a functioning alcoholic and that amount of alcohol will be having a huge i,pact on his health even if no signs as yet. You need to get him to at least cut down and agree what should be his maximum. If he drinks more if more is available he definitely has a big problem. A 25% offer and drinking double the amount wasn’t really an offer was it!

^This.

This is a pretty serious situation. He's minimising it - how much longer before his health and life start to fall apart. As that happens, your life will also be ruined.

This was my friend. He held down a very responsible job, participated in sports and regularly drove long distances, often a couple of hours after downing his third bottle of wine. Many people tried to approach him and his wife about the problem, usually after witnessing the amount he consumed in one sitting.
I was genuinely shocked and told him so. He said he needed booze to relax after a stressful day at work, but the drinking actually got worse after he retired. His wife justified it to a certain extent by saying he ‘never had a hangover, so it can’t be that bad’.
He collapsed (out of the blue, according to his family) while driving and it was only sheer luck that nobody else was hurt or killed. Won’t go into detail, but his death was a direct result of his alcoholism.

I make that around £6,000 a year you are literally pouring into the drains. Think what you could do with that.

I met a colleague when he was in his fifties. He was a shy man but did his job well enough. He liked a drink. It emerged after a couple of years that he was an alcoholic. He lost his job and it all came out into the open. He tried to get to grips with it but he needed a drink before breakfast to function and when he tried to stop he got the shakes and dry retching. He hasn't been able to get sober despite lots of intervention and programmes. He is now mid sixties and looks eighty. He falls repeatedly and his liver is shot. His drink of choice is whisky and it is a bottle a day. I suspect he has about a year left at this rate. He told me repeatedly that he only drinks because he likes the taste.

It is a shocking waste of a life which will be lost due to alcohol. He is only killing himself as he is single. Please get some support for yourself. The lying and the self deception has been horrendous.

4 bottles of wine would genuinely kill me. Is he extremely large? 6 foot 6 and 20 stone?

When he drives the next morning report him to the police. Every time. It doesn’t matter that he’s ‘functioning’, he’s still over the legal drink drive limit.

And it doesn’t affect his life so it isn’t an issue

If he drives with that much alcohol in his system one day it WILL affect his life - either he gets pulled over and breathalysed or he's in an RTA and someone gets hurt.

What a selfish prick he is driving over the limit every morning. That alone would turn me off so hugely I would be out.

So that means he drinks 150 - 200 units per week. That's not good, OP. It'll shorten his life and worse is the years of horrible and ugly decline, chaos, and physical and mental ruination and preceds any death by drinking. My father died alone in his late 40s in a bedsit due to his alcoholism. His body and mind were ruined. He had previously been an educator and staunch trade union activist, a caring and compassionate man. Alcohol robbed him of everything that was good and kind and dignified in him. Please think carefully about your future life with your DP and what it may look like.

Yeah
My exsil was like this...until she had a stroke aged 38