Love Won’t Keep Us Alive
Trying to love someone with an alcohol problem
Many years ago, I was in a relationship with a man who had an alcohol problem. In the five years we were together, we loved that sappy Eagles’ song Love Will Keep Us Alive and often played it on repeat, especially on the long road trips we took together every year.
Back then, belting out that cheesy 90s ballad in the car as we rode down highways and country roads felt like our own wonderful, blissful in-joke.
But now when I look back, I realise the song choice was quite ironic because his love almost got me un-alived on a few occasions.
When he wasn’t drunk, he was the sweetest, kindest, funniest man I’d ever met. He was unfailingly supportive of me — we met when we were working in Hong Kong, and when I moved to London for work after just two months of dating, he left and found a job in a nearby city as well. I was working a corporate job, but I really wanted to be an artist and writer. He made me believe it would be possible; he assured me, encouraged me, cheered me on, and believed in my work when I myself could not believe in it. Our mutual friends, my family and my own friends loved him and often effusively expressed how lucky I was to have such a devoted partner.
“I was standing all alone against the world outside”
— Eagles, Love Will Keep Us Alive
It was because of that last point — my loved ones liking him so much — that I often felt all alone, against the world, like the opening lines of the song.
Because how do I tell people who liked him what he was like when he got drunk? How would anyone believe that the same gentle, quiet, dryly funny, attentive boyfriend was the same person who lost his temper and chased his T-shirt-clad girlfriend out of their rental cottage in freezing -2°C (28.4°F) weather?
How do I say that this man brought his partner to a remote countryside location in a country where she did not speak the language, chugged an entire bottle of wine, and then threatened to leave her by the road when she asked him not to drive while drunk? And how he then ecstatically sped down the road, swerving right and left theatrically, while she screamed and clung to her seat and pleaded with him to stop before he crashed the car?
Would it help if I started with the less awful stories, like how he left more than 50 nasty messages on my phone within an hour because I was working on a report with a deadline instead of replying to him?
“Sometimes you’ve just got to let it ride”
— Eagles, Love Will Keep Us Alive
Love is difficult, I told myself over and over again. All relationships have their share of fights and problems, right?
We’d been together for five years. We were going to get married. We’d talked over and over about the children we’d have, where we would live, what kind of parents we were going to be.
It seemed crazy — absolutely destructive, in fact — to throw away that kind of love when it was just an alcohol thing that happened once every few months.
Looking back, I realise I had no perspective on what the boundaries of acceptable behaviour were, because I could not bring myself to confide in anybody.
And to be brutally honest, it wasn’t just that I thought people wouldn’t believe me. It was humiliating, too, to admit to all these people cheering us on that our #couplegoals nearly ended in couple gaol once when the police pulled us over because he was driving so erratically after downing a six-pack in rapid-fire succession.
So instead, I learned to recognise the early signs of an alcohol-fuelled mania coming on. He was able to drink socially on most occasions, so I made sure I kept count of the number of drinks he’d had and quickly stopped him when he was nearing the threshold.
Sometimes he binge-drank before meeting me, and he was usually able to mask his inebriation for quite a while. So I learned to spot the signs — the glassy and over-bright eyes, the robotic and over-long grins, the twitchy and fidgety hands. By that point it was usually too late to stop anything he wanted to do, but at least I could marshal my inner strength and mentally hunker down to weather the storm.
Sometimes his alcoholic spells weren’t actually dangerous. They could be manic instead. He would come up with a dozen money-making schemes or self-improvement ideas, each wackier than the last. In those cases, I just had to go along and agree with him, because the one time I tried to explain why him wanting to quit his job on the spot, learn coding within a week, and build an income-generating website was a really unfeasible idea, it did not end well to say the least.
“I would die for you
Climb the highest mountain”
— Eagles, Love Will Keep Us Alive
The day after each alcohol storm was inevitably filled with nonstop, abject apologies, tears, contrition, and fervent promises to do better. Each time I would be so relieved it was over that it felt easier to accept his apology and move on.
We made dozens of plans for how he would quit over-drinking. We tried going cold turkey together, we tried capping alcohol intake to two glasses per day, we tried journalling, therapy, and a bunch of sometimes dodgy plans I downloaded from the internet.
They all failed, because firstly we didn’t live together so he would often relapse back home; and second and more importantly, he didn’t believe his drinking was actually a problem because he could never remember anything he did when he was drunk. He did make attempts to follow my sobriety plans mostly to keep me happy. But it always felt as though I was the one who needed to quit drinking, not him — ironic because I drink very little and fall asleep if I go beyond three drinks.
After one exceptionally bad holiday, I realised I could not make myself live like this for the next few decades, dreading the next drunken outburst. I could not have children with this man and live in fear every time they were alone with him. I myself could not continue to live in fear when I’m alone with him.
I finally got the courage to break up with him one rainy February night, after weeks of tormented self-doubt about my decision. It was one week after Valentine’s Day.
After our breakup, he tried to come back several times. Once, I almost relented. We made plans to meet the next week to see if we could salvage what we had.
That night, I went out with a group of ex-colleagues. One of the men got drunk and rowdy, and I nearly had a breakdown. I broke out in cold sweat, my heart started palpitating, and I felt like throwing up.
At the time, I didn’t realise I was having a trauma response to seeing a male friend get drunk and aggressive, but the next day, all the dots connected.
I called him to tell him that we should completely cease all contact. He was very upset, and wanted to know why. Finally, I snapped: “Think of what you’ve done!” I remember yelling at him in a red mist. “Will my future daughter or son be sitting in a car with a drunk father? Will I spend the next decades counting your drinks when we’re out? Will I live in fear that you’re going to quit your job in a drunken haze and do something crazy?”
That was the last time we spoke to each other. I still feel a complicated mix of sorrow, sympathy, bitterness and anger when I think back about the five years we had together.
If we had found some way to solve his alcohol problem, I would now be married to the man I’d loved deeply; we might have had kids by now; maybe a dog, definitely a few cats; there would have been countless evenings of cooking and cleaning together; many long, blissful walks in the park; hours of holding hands in our favourite museum arguing about art history.
But these are all just wistful fantasies, a flimsy house of cards felled by a single puff of wind, or the next drunken rage. Because unlike our Eagles’ song, love can’t keep us alive — not if he didn’t want to fix his own alcohol issues. Or perhaps, another way to look at it is that my love for myself kept me alive, and finally rescued me from a hopeless situation.
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Written in response to Modern Women’s February’s prompt “Aspects of Love”.
