My father drank too much. His mother was an alcoholic. I don't know the yardstick by which you mark the difference between heavy drinking and alcoholism, but my feeling is he was as dependent on the booze as his mother was. I took my cues on how to handle his drinking from the rest of my family. No one wanted to confront him about it. In the evenings, when he began his heavy drinking, he stayed out in the kitchen, by himself. The rest of the family stayed in the rest of the house and pretended nothing was happening in the kitchen. It was my father's decision to drink heavily, and if I had a problem with it, then I had to find my own solution. My solution was to stay out of the kitchen when I was home, and not to visit home in the evenings once I'd moved out.
This policy of non-confrontational problem solving has stayed with me all through my adulthood. If what you're doing doesn't hurt anybody else, then go ahead and do it. If what you're doing hurts me, then I move out of the way so that it doesn't hurt me. Oh, I've got my breaking point. If you are intentionally setting out to make me your target, I will fight back. But if it's only yourself you're abusing, then it's your choice, and none of my business.
This weekend I was given reason to do some serious thinking. The Socialist has for the past year been slowly creeping up to that nebulous boundary separating casual habit from serious problem. He and I had spoken of this several times, and his response was always to ask me to set the boundaries for him and then hold him to them. I couldn't do that. It made me responsible for his actions, and I refused that responsibility. He'd set some limits on himself, but Saturday night he again exceeded those self-imposed limits. In my mind, the boundary between what I could accept and what I couldn't accept was crossed Saturday night.
If he has a problem or not is for him to decide. My problem was a separate issue: did I want to live with him if this was what he wanted to do. And that's what I got up early Sunday morning to ponder. This was not a matter for discussion. I will not set ultimatums ... that just makes me responsible for somebody else's actions again. I didn't want to talk it out again. We'd talked of it before, and my opinions were no different than those I'd voiced previously. I just had to decide where I was going from that point on.
While I was doing my thinking, The Socialist woke up and came to find me. He wanted to know what I was thinking, but I hadn't come to any decisions yet and didn't want to discuss it until I had. He pressed though, and so I told him what I've written here in the previous two paragraphs, ending with I wasn't ready to discuss it yet.
He said he understood, then went downstairs. Some ten or fifteen minutes later he returned. He decided independently to deal with the issue, and had taken some measures while he was downstairs to show he was serious. I hadn't expected this, and it brought me close to tears.
I think this might be the first time that someone decided that their problem was hurting me, and took measures to correct it from their end. I love him the more for his decision. And since he took this action on his own, and not at my request, I can feel that it wasn't done under coercion, and therefore won't be held against me. I feel like a huge weight has been lifted from me.