Getting better with age, and the evolution of a marriage in recovery

My wife, Priscilla, isn’t the same woman I met and fell in love with 21 years ago. She’s not the same woman I married 16 years ago this week.

She’s better. Smarter. More caring and loving. More open about her needs and more understanding about what goes on in my head, and what doesn’t.

We’ve both changed, for better and for worse. The idiosyncrasies we laughed at or ignored in those earliest years have either gone away with age, or amplified in strange ways. They’ve escalated into serious problems that threatened our very relationship, and some of them have enhanced what we mean and what we are to each other.

Through all of that, through the highs and lows, we’ve endured and thrived and had some serious reality checks along the way.

But love, in the sage words of Captain & Tennille, love will keep us together, and it has — against all better judgment.

Frankly, she could have ditched me long ago, and no one could have blamed her. It was I who spent 11 of the last 16 years a declining drunkard, whose maturity level and emotional growth ceased when the party and downward spiral began, when the physical and emotional demands of alcohol addiction made me a nightmare to live with.

It took a lot for me to give it all up, and she was there for me the whole time. Of course she cried, questioned what she was doing sticking around, probably secretly asking herself if she was getting what she deserved, like so many women caught up in these types of relationships do.

But she stayed.

For that, there will never be any words to express my gratitude or how much I love and appreciate this woman.

It’s fitting that in the 16th year of our marriage, I also have been in my fifth year of physical sobriety. So, in probably only the ways that someone recovering from addiction or someone married to a recovering addict can understand, this is essentially like our fifth anniversary.

It’s been about me learning who and what I am, and her figuring herself out, too. My personality has changed, and sometimes not for the better. I’m more introverted today than I’ve ever been, and sometimes even more selfish than I was in the grips of a selfish disease.

For Priscilla, I believe this has been really surprising, probably even downright shocking to the degree that she will never be able to adequately express.

Yet some incredible things have come from this — we’ve had to rise from what could only be described as a pit of despair in our marriage and crawl our way back up to the summit. Sure, we lost our footing along the way, sliding backward into periods of anger and resentment.

But we have always moved forward, and the momentum feels unstoppable today. Because what we’ve got never came easy; it’s been earned, and we’ve always tried and fought and persevered.

We’ve steadily come to understand each other in the last few years in really amazing ways, grown in our relationship, our shared experiences as parents and, ultimately, our love. I really believe that: The love we have today was always worth fighting for, and we can finally see the horizon when for many years the clouds seemed their darkest.

I apologize if this seems self-serving, even repetitive, considering I’ve told parts of this story before. However, there is a cruel reality about marriage and relationships in recovery: They often don’t survive.

Personalities change dramatically and sometimes irrevocably. Wives and husbands put themselves in the role of caretakers of the sick, and come out on the other end lost. When the recovering spouse realizes that standing on his or her own two feet is central to long-term recovery and sobriety, the other half can feel left out and adrift.

What’s more, drugs and alcohol blunt our feelings, medicate and hide fundamental mental health issues and create new ones, and those things can take years to get under control and deal with. There are apologies to be made that can hurt both sides. There is soul searching that needs to be done, new roles to be assumed.

If the relationship cannot weather those realities, it will buckle and break.

Or it can get stronger and better. There is a chance to start over again, to live within new realities and with new boundaries, and to become equal partners not co-dependents.

I’m not a superstitious person; never have been. I can comfortably say Priscilla and I feel like that success story amid a storm that lasted longer than either one of us can stomach to acknowledge. Yet, I will never forget it and will always appreciate who and what I have. What we have.

Happy anniversary, my dearest wife and partner.

This column initially appeared in the Imperial Valley Press, Nov. 21, 2014.