Love is a Many Splendor Thing

I have been thinking about all the negative things I've said about Dick. You're probably wondering why I married him, and stayed married so long. It's simple, I was in love. I loved him, and I trusted him. I felt safe with him. In the beginning the drinking was not a problem. Sometimes when he drank it was a problem, but that was only on the weekends at a party or social gathering. It wasn't an everyday occurrence. Normal everyday life did not include me shuttering with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach at the sound of a beer can being popped open. He used to call it a happy sound. I hated hearing it. It wasn't until the last year or so that he was drinking almost everyday, and many times way passed the point of just 'gettin' a buzz on'. It is truly amazing the things you are able to overlook when you love someone. You keep hoping that it will get better, but it doesn't. You keep telling yourself that you are going to speak up and lay down the law, but you don't. Why? Because sometimes it's just easier to ride out the storm. You know it will pass and the sun will shine again. After a bad session with him, the next day it would be like it never happened. I was never really sure if he was just ignoring the elephant in the room, or if he suffered from black outs and really didn't remember. At that point things were calm and because I so didn't want to churn up the storm I wouldn't say anything. I, like him, would act like everything was fine. It took me a long time to be able to say the word 'alcoholic'. In my book that was the reason for a lot our difficulties. It was the catalyst for all the mistakes and bad decisions he made. The problem I had with doing something about it was...guilt. I couldn't leave him because he was an alcoholic. They say alcoholism is a disease. To me, leaving because of that would be like abandoning a sick child because you're too tired to care for it anymore. If he had cancer, or some other disease, I wouldn't leave him, so how could leave because he drank too much? I couldn't. But, when I discovered he was having an affair that guilt melted away in seconds, and I was free. It took me another 7 months to finally pack up and leave partly because I was willing to give him a second chance and also because I needed to gather more information about what he was up to exactly. There was a small part of me that thought we might be able to find our way back, but mostly I knew it was over, I just had to be sure. The bottom line was, I didn't trust him anymore. It didn't matter what else I felt for him. If there wasn't trust, there was nothing.