# "Recovering" and ditching his wife



## eastcoastlove

Hello everyone, I have been searching for a site like this for a month, thank god I found it!!

Here's the situation as clearly and briefly as possible.

My husband and I are both 29. Been together 7 years married 3 of them. My husband is a "recovering" alcoholic. He was doing great however about 1 1/2 years ago he decided to start smoking pot again but not drinking. I have been clean of pot for almost 4 years now. Now, he is going to AA and coming home and smoking weed. When we first met, we were both into it (pot) and he was clean of Meth for 3 months at this time. His family is nothing to be desired, his father just divorced his 5th wife, mother a crack addict. He did not have a childhood that I would wish apon anyone. 

Before we got engaged, while still drinking, he left me twice to "find himself". He came back saying he was ready to accept me and wanted to spend the rest of his life with me. We got engaged a few months after he moved back in. On his birthday is when the drinking hit rock bottom. I gave him the ring back told him i wasn't marrying him like this. He had gotten a DUI and was given the option to go to jail for 3 weeks or enter into an in-patient rehab. Thankfully, he chose rehab. By this time my pot smoking days were over and I was ready to move into a sober life with him. He got out of rehab and was on the AA high, hitting every meeting and completely diving into the AA way of living. I loved every minute of it. 

Fast forward to now. In the time of him being sober (3 years), we got married, moved across country to where I am from (completely his idea) and now he has left me. We don't fight, he refuses to. His family fought and when a discussion might turn into a constructive argument he leaves. He doesn't rock the boat. He came home from work one night and said "I am not happy, I need to grow up". Completely out of the blue. Now he wont even aknowledge me. He has been gone for almost 2 months. We have sat down and talked but nothing comes of it. He says he's confused but says he doesn't think its going to work between us. I have suggested counseling and he says he needs to work on himself first. He wont speak to me. I didn't even know we were having problems, it was like we were working on our marriage but he forgot to tell me!! He was "working" on our marriage by himself. So selfish. 

I have been his support system through all of this. I understand he needs to find his independence but I don't understand why he feels he needs to get rid of me. We are best friends, we went though things that most marriages go through in 15 years, I don't get his reasoning, I don't get why he treats me like he doesn't even know me, like I am the most horrible person in the world, I have NEVER cheated or have done anything, he says he doesn't know how to love like I do. I don't know maybe, hopefully, someone else has gone through this too. 

Thanks for listening.


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## swedish

I'm sorry to hear of your situation. I haven't been through this and am not sure I have anything to offer in the way of advice, but it does sound as though he was not properly equipped in childhood to deal with conflict. Is he still going to AA? 'I need to grow up' contradicts his actions of walking out so I wonder what he meant by that statement?


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## MarkTwain

With his childhood, he wont know up from down, emotionally speaking. It may well be that he is suddenly waking up to the mess he finds himself in. He may also be feeling guilty for his sorry state which is sad, but normal.

You might get somewhere by taking his statement that he is working on himself at face value, and ask him how it is going.


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## voivod

his leaving mirrors the selfishness that an alcoholic learns during his/her addiction. i am not an expert but have studied much about alcoholism/addiction since in admitted to my own alcoholism on may 19th of this year.

he has taken an incredibly selfish way out of dealing with things in an adult manner. he is unable to cope in an adult-like fashion. i don't know how much that helps, but to explain it from a users perspective. i would say continue leading your life free fron substance. if he truly is using this time to mature and grow up, he'll see that his best choice was no choice at all and her will come around.


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## eastcoastlove

Thank you very much for the comments. They all make so much sense. Since I posted a few things have come to surface.

1. he is not willing to work on things with us. He feels as though our marriage came about by him "feeling guilty" to how badly he treated me in the beginning of our relationship, he felt he had to propose to make up for it. But says he has only started to feel unhappy for the last year.

2. although I do not make it a habit to read his writings from AA, i was packing up some of his things and found a couple of short thoughts he had written down. He said he had a growing resentment towards me because I had gained some weight. How dare he judge me on my weight after everything he has done and still does. He is the last person that should be judging anybody. 

3. I am not sure that i even want the relationship to be resolved. It kills me that we are not together. I would do anything to have my husband back, but, sober or not, he is still doing the same things he did when he was drinking, the only difference is is that he is doing them without alcohol. His mentality is still the same. He hasn't grown out of the 22 year old he was when we met. 

Hopefully, him getting his own place, and having to be accountable and responsible will wake him up and make him grow up. I couldn't do that for him nor did I want to. 

Now that he has his own place, he told me that he was getting a part-time night job ontop of his fulltime job. Something I had to do for 4 years....maybe he will see what I had to go through and how I felt at the end of the day, when he was doing nothing to help our situation. Maybe, now that he has to pay bills and keep his place up, he will put himself in my shoes for one second and see exactly how I felt when I was taking on the responsibility of myself, him, the house and the bills, maybe now, in time, he will actually see and feel how I did for so long.

I may never get the appology I feel that I deserve or the Thank You that I also feel that I deserve but I know that everything i did I did with my heart and no strings attached. Everything I did, i did because I truely cared about his wellbeing and truely wanted to see him become the man I knew and still know he can be. It saddens me to think that if the time comes that I get the appology it will be because something horrible has happened to him.


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## swedish

You may never get an apology or thank-you, but as you say, he is still in the 22 year-old mindset and that's who he is and where he's at...it's not that you're undeserving to hear those things from him...he's just not capable to put himself in your shoes.

I hope you are able to move forward on your own and keep your spirits up and that you have the support of family and friends. Are you planning to stay where you are or are you considering moving back near family?


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