Let me paint a little picture for you. It’s February 2017 and Korey and I have baby Fischer at home. For whatever reason, we couldn’t celebrate Valentine’s Day on Valentine’s Day that year, so we ended up deciding to celebrate Valentine’s Day on a Sunday by going out for brunch. Because God forbid we just give each other a card, a smooch, and call it a day. I loved a reason to “celebrate,” aka drink. My parents were keeping Fischer for us, so we go out for brunch, which includes lots of food and mimosas/Bloody Mary’s/beers/seltzers/ciders/wine – you get the picture. After brunch we decide to go to a brewery, because the party can never just end after the brunch we have planned. We get to the brewery and after our first beer or two, we run into one of my good friends and her boyfriend who we haven’t seen in a while. We decide to stick around and have a few beers with them. By this time, it’s late afternoon and we’re ready to leave the brewery but we’re not ready to be done partying. Correction – my friend and I weren’t ready to be done partying. Korey and my friend’s boyfriend were VERY done and ready to go home, but we weren’t having it. We dragged them to another bar, closer to my friend’s apartment at the time. We have a few shots of fireball, a few Marlboro menthol lights, we are feeling really good. Then we decide we want to go to a strip club. On a Sunday. At 6 pm. After drinking for 7+ hours. The boys weren’t happy but went along with it begrudgingly. We had to stop at the gas station before we went because this particular strip club was BYOB due to losing their liquor license recently. Real classy establishments we frequent 😉. Anyway, we go the strip club, we are pretty much the only people there, we hang for an hour or two, and then we eventually Uber home. Now, it’s Monday morning and I wake up with a hangover from HELL. I have to pick Fischer up from my parent’s house (because obviously they ended up keeping him overnight after initially agreeing to keep him for 2 hours for brunch) and get him to daycare. We have to navigate getting back to the bar we left our car at (30 minutes from home). I have to go to work. I get to work, close my office door, lie on the floor, and cry for 20 minutes before ultimately deciding I can’t do it and go home for the day, “sick.” This was our Valentine’s Day celebration. A true celebration of our love for each other.

We had lots of dates that went something like this. Now this is a bit of an extreme example with the Sunday strip club escapades, but our dates were pretty much a version of the rest of this story. We would normally have a drink or two while we got ready at home, go to a bar for a drink or two, go out for a meal of some kind, go to another bar after our meal, and then go home and have a few more drinks while we watched a tv show or a movie. Normally Korey would go to bed at a reasonable time, and I would stay up by myself, FaceTiming my girlfriends or trying to convince someone to come over and hang out with me. VERY romantic shit. I’m not sure how we slipped into this kind of a pattern, always relying on alcohol to be the focal part of our time together. I guess alcohol was always there. Korey and I met in college, so from the beginning of our relationship, alcohol was a big part of our story. Obviously at that time, neither of us were very different from any other typical college students in a relationship. We did the same things we did before we met each other, the only difference being we started including each other in our plans and taking turns partying with my friends or his friends. We didn’t go on dates because we didn’t want to, and we didn’t have money. We just went from party to party or from bar to bar. As we got older, got jobs, got married, and had kids, it felt like we needed to revert back to that version of ourselves if we wanted to escape the stresses of everyday life. Like in a way, that’s the version of ourselves we fell in love with so if we wanted to bond or relax, that’s how we had to do it.

I think a lot of people feel this way, whether they admit it or not. I will say that the first time I had the thought in my head that maybe I needed to stop drinking, like long term, my NUMBER ONE fear was losing my husband or my relationship. I have talked to many other people, women and men, who have voiced the same concern. Honestly, it’s a valid concern. I wrestled with this a lot and struggled silently about my relationship with alcohol before going to Korey about it in any serious or formal way. I felt like once I said something out loud, I couldn’t take it back and things would never be the same. I was scared that he would think “I didn’t sign up for this shit,” or “it’s not my fault that you have a problem,” or “I shouldn’t be punished because you can’t handle your liquor.”  Clearly, I was putting a lot of words in his mouth and not actually giving him the opportunity to speak for himself. I made a lot of assumptions about his reaction based on my own insecurities and shame. We had a lot of coded conversations where we were both walking on eggshells, afraid to say any of the wrong words or imply anything that would hurt the other’s feelings. It was uncharted water for us and neither of us knew how to deal with the elephant in the room, which was my drinking.

I don’t remember a specific conversation where I decided to let my guard down and just talk openly about my concerns. I think I eased into it and he eased into it and we each inched our way closer to the subject without anyone making any sudden or abrupt movements 😉. I did a few sober challenges on my own, giving up drinking for 30 or 60 or 90 days at a time. We also did a few sober challenges together. Every time one of the challenges was up, I would celebrate by going balls-to-the-wall and pick-up right where I left off. Every time this happened, we were building our evidence and proving to ourselves that unless we wanted this to be a lifelong struggle, getting on and off the hamster wheel, we needed to have a bigger and more impactful type of conversation.

When I told Korey that I wanted to try giving up alcohol for an entire year just to see how it changed me, I never expected in a million years for him to do it with me. I expected him to support me like he always did, and I expected him to be respectful about his drinking in front of me, but it genuinely never crossed my mind that he would commit to it with me, especially while owning a craft beer store and taproom. Yet he did. I never asked him to, but he committed to it without much deliberation or resistance. I don’t know why I never considered that someone could actually love and respect and care for me so much that they would be willing to make this life-changing sacrifice for me, without really having to think too hard about it, even. I had this ah-ha moment where I realized I had written this entire narrative in my head about how much he would resent me for changing our lifestyle, when I never actually gave him the opportunity to tell me or show me how he actually felt about it. Once I put it out there and put the ball in his court, he knew exactly what to do with it and it was the complete opposite of all this drama I had built up in my head.

Everyone’s circumstances are different because every person is different and every relationship is different. I am telling our story not because I expect for everyone else’s situation to be the same, but because it’s proof that whatever you think you know about your relationship or what someone else is feeling or thinking about YOUR drinking, you don’t know for sure until you give them the chance to show you. Whatever it is you think you know, I urge you to challenge it. I urge you to give your partner or the people in your life the opportunity to prove you wrong. It’s scary as shit to say the words out loud and it’s true you can’t ever really take them back. But if you don’t take the leap and start the conversation, in whatever way feels most comfortable, you’ll just keep ending up right where you started.

If you are reading this as someone in a relationship with someone who has voiced concerns around their own drinking or wanting to take a closer look at their relationship with alcohol, I urge you to keep an open mind. If alcohol is a big part of your life together, I understand it can be really scary to think about what the future may look like without it. What will you talk about? What will you do? Try not to focus on those big, scary, generalizing type of questions. Think about your partner and how you can support them in the healthiest way possible. If you have an open mind and keep the focus on your relationship and open communication, then I promise you there are no bad outcomes.   

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