What kind of relationship can you have with an alcoholic?

Well, I don't think you can have a relationship at all in the conventional sense of a man/woman's loving relationship in which you both contribute in the same way. It is bound to be badly disrupted by the alcoholism of one partner. Indeed destroyed often or normally as it is intolerable. It is the alcoholic's lying with damages trust which is also a major factor. It is said that it is the sober partner of the drunk alcoholic is suffers far more and relatives of the alcoholic if they are close. The drunk is out of it. Sleeping through all the mayhem.

What kind of relationship can you have with an alcoholic? Image: Pixabay.

In fact, I would be surprised if any partnership survived the alcoholism of one partner provided the other was either a non-drinker or certainly not alcoholic. In other words you are mixing together one normal, healthy person without a drink problem with a person who has a genuine drink problem. The amount of friction that generates is going to destroy the relationship, normally. It might not and if it doesn't the tendency will be for the non-drinker to become a carer for the drinker out of an inherent love.

That love may originate in the need of the non-drinker to care for somebody else. This in turn may be a weakness or it may be a strength, it depends on your point of view. But I believe there has to be an element of caring for someone in such a relationship.

Or, the relationship may be distorted into one of parent-to-child even if the ages of the two partners are the same. Alcoholics frequently cannot look after themselves for obvious reasons. Their lives are substantially messed up by their drink problem. It does of course depend upon how an alcoholic copes with their drinking. Some alcoholics are functioning alcoholics whereas others are devastating binge alcoholics which stops their life functioning completely for maybe about four weeks. This is bound to disturb their lifestyle and have a quite dramatically negative impact on it.

All genuine alcoholics will tend to have health problems to varying degrees. Their addiction may be killing them or it may make them unhealthy. It will certainly be demotivating them so they are unable to attain the standard they should attain with respect to work and lifestyle generally. As everyone knows, it is a highly destructive habit and I believe it is a very strong habit rather than a disease which is commonly quoted by the experts.

I believe that experts describe alcoholism as a disease in order to remove guilt from the alcoholic. If you remove guilt from the alcoholic it is more likely that they can function better because it removes or helps to remove low self-esteem. Low self-esteem is one of the causes of alcoholism.

The point, there, is that alcoholics frequently (or always?) have other mental health issues. These also impact on the relationship negatively. And alcoholics have to lie. Even if they're not natural liars they learn to do it. 

They have to try and hide their alcoholism and they do that through lying. This lying about one subject i.e. alcoholism, leads to lying about other subjects which in turn can dramatically erode a loving relationship. It removes trust and once you remove trust you can fatally undermine a loving relationship. It's like a disease of its own. Chipping away at the love between the parties to the point where it becomes a stale, hollow vestige of what it once was.

Perhaps the only sort of relationship between a non-drinker and a drinker which survives is when the non-drinker needs to care for someone and they treat the drinker as a daughter they didn't have or a patient they naturally want to help. And that last emotion may emanate from their own personal experiences when they were young and abused.