I was brutally hungover when my wife of ten years told me she was leaving me. I was completely blindsided. In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been. I’d spent the last few years turning my already problematic drinking into a full-blown dumpster fire, and, consequently, had become almost completely emotionally unavailable to her and, essentially, to everyone else in my life. I’d been narrowly escaping rock bottom for years, and here it finally was. I cried and begged for forgiveness. I was willing to do anything. We talked things out for a bit, and it was clear that if there was going to be any hope of saving our relationship, I’d have to quit drinking. I vowed that I would. She left the house. I went down to my local and drank a dozen Miller Lites.

Hungover again the next morning, I started frantically Googling, “Can quitting drinking save your relationship?” My marriage was the core of everything that was good, joyful, and meaningful in my life, but, if I was being honest, so was alcohol. If I was going to give up drinking I needed some kind of reassurance that it would be worth it and my relationship would be saved. But I couldn’t find any answers…a Quora article here, a Reddit thread there, but nothing was giving me the answer I wanted. So I set out to learn more. I downloaded a sober tracker and called some friends for support.

“Doing anything else effectively while re-evaluating your relationship with a substance or self-destructive behavior is damn near impossible,” says Tawny Lara, a sober relationship expert and author of Dry Humping, a book about sober dating [AFTER Fall 2023, Tawny Lara, p.22, link in our digital edition]. “‘Doing ‘the work’ usually leads to seeing ourselves differently, which means we usually see the world differently. So, of course, our interpersonal relationships shift during that arduous process. The whole ‘you can’t love someone unless you love yourself’ maxim is a cliché for a reason. Getting sober or sober-curious requires patience, understanding, and outside support for everyone involved, especially our loved ones.”

It had occurred to me from time to time that I might eventually have to quit drinking, but I never considered how that might look if my relationship was hanging on by a thread. We started couples counseling in the aftermath of our separation. With each passing sobriety milestone, I slowly began to realize that I was now in the process of trying to fix two relationships: my marriage and my relationship with booze. The alcoholic fog was lifting, and for the first time in years, I was surveying the damage of my life in crystal clear detail, and it didn’t look good.

“Many people think quitting drinking is just…quitting drinking,” says Lara. “But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Below the surface lies all the stuff we often drank to ignore. When those repressed emotions, traumas, and insecurities finally bubble to the surface, everything changes.”