The other night, I went out to dinner with a couple I’ve known and been close to for years. As we sat at the bar of an über-hip downtown NYC restaurant, waiting for our table to materialize, my friend and I got to talking. My kids were babysitting hers, so we chatted about how cute that was. But we quickly moved on to work, how we both needed to shed a few pounds, and former boyfriends.
I learned, after all these years, that my friend used to go out with a recovering alcoholic (before she married my husband’s friend) and had many other friends who had been to AA, and who she had personally escorted to rehab.
Over my caiprinha and her vodka martini, she explained how she comes from a very straight family, but somehow has always been drawn to those who are prone to addiction and like to party and have a type of fun that her own family members didn’t have.
Conversely, I come from a family where fun and partying were right up there with dark chocolate and coffee ice cream (read: the best things in life). I loved the fact that my parents enjoy their life and weren’t afraid to show it—with friends, dinner parties, wine, dancing and lots of laughter.
When I met my husband, the fact that he liked to drink and party was attractive to me, and we’ve been doing it together (in moderation) for more than 20 years. But what if I fell for someone who was an alcoholic? How would it feel to sacrifice my love for drinking wine and catching a good buzz? I can’t help but wonder, are we attracted to those who either like to party or don’t? What do you think?
I’ve been attracted to both partiers and non-partiers. At 30, I’m not much of a partier. Thankfully my husband isn’t either. I enjoy a good beer or glass of wine every once in a while, but I’m not a “to excess” kind of gal.
However, it IS hard to pair a compulsive personality with a non-compulsive personality. I have an insatiable sweet tooth and a resulting weight problem! (Yes, I’m in “fixing it” mode at present.) My husband is not nearly an exact opposite, his weakness certainly not food and not a lick of chub to be seen.
Having snack foods in the house, particularly those I crave, is maddening! He gets fussy when I give in and eat “his” stuff and rightly so. Sometimes he bends and takes the sweets to work or lets me fill the house with my good-for-you treats that make him all frowny-faced. So with that in mind I can say that he has definitely had to curb his snacking enthusiasm in order to curb mine. That being said, I imagine it would be similar in frustration and sadness, only perhaps more so, being intimately linked with an alcoholic.
As a child of alcoholics and recovering alcoholic I was uncomfortable around people who didn’t abuse alcohol for the longest time, but things changed. Today I am married to a man whom I have never seen drink. Mind you, he made a conscious decision to quit over a decade ago because it was becoming a problem. Not sure if I could really connect with someone who didn’t share some of my alcoholic issues!
I always say I don’t trust people who don’t drink. But, I’m disregarding those AA people, and that’s really inconsiderate of me. But the thought crosses my mind a lot that I hope to God I’m not one of them someday, because I couldn’t enjoy the taste of my lovely red wine. I could do without all other alcohol, just don’t take my wine. My husband and I drink wine (or he has his stinky beer) basically every night of the week, and then over-do it sometimes on weekends…we have fun. But, every now and then, one of us decides we need to cut back, or even stop. After new years eve last year, he didn’t drink for the first two weeks of the year. I felt so alone! We’ve both said we wouldn’t know what to do if the other was alcoholic (in the diagnosed sense), and that we probably wouldn’t stop drinking for each other. But what if it were an ultimatum? The fact that we might choose booze over each other is a sad case. Which brings the realization that yea, we’re probably alci’s, if you ask a pro, and at this point, we’re just embracing it. We take cabs now a lot, and are trying to be responsible drunks, in the comforts of our own home, at night. When we start having martinis at lunch and they continue into evening, we’ll reconsider.