Your help and advice would be most welcome. I've been married for 23 years, we have 3 young children. I'm pretty sure my OH is an alcoholic-he would say he has a problem with drink! We married very young and in the early years, drinking wasn't really something that played a part in our lives. I would say that he has been drinking regularly for about 15 years-maybe a bit longer. I'm talking a bottle of wine every night.
Over the past year he has drank more, it got to 2 bottles each night. I don't drink so he always drinks alone when we have all gone to bed. I would often have disturbed sleep because I could hear him bashing around, falling into things. He'd stumble into bed totally oblivious, or not even make it to bed and sleep downstairs. I would dread going downstairs to see what damage had been done. He has broken the childrens toys, and even a school project that I had forgotten to move out of the way! He's left outside doors wide open all through the night.
Despite all this-I never really considered not being with him and I totally buried my head because I didn't want to fall out with him. He's never been violent or abusive in any way-but then, I'm never downstairs when he's drinking.
This was until he came to bed one night and urinated over the bedroom floor as he sat on my side of the bed (this was about 6 months ago) From that point I began to seriously consider leaving him and could hardly look at him I was so disgusted. He had no memory of doing any of these things and didn't really say much when I told him.
Anyway (sorry this is all so long!) he surprised me 3 months ago by confessing, unprompted, that he'd drank 2 bottles the previous evening and wasnt even tipsy. He has always said his reason for drinking is that he has trouble sleeping-it wasnt helping him now!
I saw this as a major breakthrough and he said he'd do anything because he'd realised how close he had come to losing me and the kids. I told him no alcohol in the house-no drinking at all. This worked for 1 week. It was a great week-we reconnected, went away for a night (no kids!) and it felt wonderful.
I'm sure those of you living a similar life know exactly what comes next! He announces that he will drink just one bottle of wine on a friday and sat night and not drink any other time. To cut a long (really long-sorry!) story short, he is now drinking 1 and a half bottles, sometimes 2 every night again. I feel like we are back to square one. He has even started to hide his bottles-he doesn't know that I know where his stash is and that I mark the bottles so I know exactly what he drinks. I have worked out that he is spending over £200 a month on drink-we are not wealthy and this makes me so angry.
He looks awful, doesnt look after himself and I worry about him holding down his job (he has his own business). I work part time, and would struggle-but would find a way-if we were to seperate.
So-I feel very lonely, my mum and in laws know what's going on to some extent, but I would really value some imput. I do have to say that I feel I've been very weak in many ways to not confront him and have probably enabled him without me realising it until I started to pull my head out of the sand and did a bit of research etc. So, I'm reaching out