Squeegle, I too found that my ex's alcoholism led to me isolating myself. If I set a date for us going to see my mum, my ex would get utterly rat-faced the night before and trigger a massive argument so things would be tense and unhappy. If we went out together to meet friends she'd likely get trollied and I'd end the evening trying to keep a lid on her drunken outbursts and aggression while apologising to the people she'd offended. So I'd turn down a lot of invites.
At the time I had a job where there were a number of opportunities to socialise after work - many of them effectively mandatory for me to attend - and partners/spouses were almost always invited. After way too many instances of my ex's arseholery at such events, my boss took me to one side and asked me not to bring her along any more. That was most definitely not a fun conversation.
It took me a long long time to properly see the patterns in my ex's behaviour. I had been viewing each abusive evening (it wasn't every time) as a largely isolated incident that had been triggered (as she maintained) by something I'd said, or done, or not said, or not done, or looked at in a funny way etc. I knew it was linked to her drinking but I saw the booze as just heightening her reaction to something I'd done "wrong".
But after a particularly bad few months (she'd been drinking so much so often she pretty much went nuts) I saw it for what it truly was. She went through a cycle of:
Not drinking at all, to
Drinking a small amount, to
Drinking a lot every weekend, to
Drinking a lot every day, to
Permanently shit-faced, to
Something really bad happening and her drying out
Then the cycle starts again. The amount of time she spends at each level varies - can be days, can be weeks, can be months - but it always progresses until something so awful happens that spurs her to stop drinking and just take the alcohol withdrawal. As time has gone on the "something so awful" has got more severe. It used to be an absolutely awful blazing row. Now it's more likely that she finds herself in hospital. And her drinking has reached a level where she does usually need to dry out in hospital to stave off the risk of seizures.
But the cycle was always there. Once I realised that it made me look at it differently and helped me to realise that it doesn't matter what I said or did. If she was pissed and in a bad mood then she would blame me. I've seen her, on a number of occasions, deliberately trigger an argument just so she can say something cutting and then march off to the fridge to get a drink with a hearty "so fuck YOU!"
I could be anyone at that moment. I could be Ghandi or Ghengiz Khan, she'd pick an argument and stomp off to get herself a drink. It's not about me or what I had allegedly said or done. It's all about her justifying to herself her decision to drink and, if necessary, engineering a scenario where that choice seems acceptable. I'm not sure if that's a conscious thing or a habit or just the addiction messing with her mind. To be honest, it doesn't matter (to me, anyway). It's not something I can influence.
Before we finally split, my ex had a series of making promises that she'd stop drinking and then resuming in secret while basically daring me to say something about it. Every time we went round that particular merry-go-round of denial, it felt like she was pouring yet another bottleful of her favourite cheap wine and strong cider on the remaining few flames of my love for her. And in the end she extinguished the last flame.
I, too, read a lot about alcoholism. Most of it was a waste of time as I'm not an alcoholic. Saying that, this page talks about addictions in a way that really resonates with me as it matches exactly what was going on when I stopped smoking as well as chiming with my ex's tendency to pick arguments (There is some good stuff elsewhere on that site but most of it is an anti-AA diatribe.)
What I got a lot more benefit from was to learn about how other people's alcoholism can affect me. Melody Beattie's "Codependent No More" is a powerful book and one I recommend to anyone in a relationship with an alcoholic. Al-Anon helped me more by realising that other people were going through the same crap as me than in anything else but, at the time, that was valuable. One-to-one counselling was much more productive for me and quite possibly saved my life.