The Battle of the Sexes When the Man's Wife is an Alcoholic

The Battle of the Sexes When the Man’s Wife is an Alcoholic

For American men in particular it is especially difficult to step aside and let somebody else do anything. Why is this? This is because of what we were taught from birth, who our parents were, and our built-in cultural bias that favors self-sufficiency.
First, the people who settled America at the outset were not typical of those who made up the population where they were born. This situation has been studied and documented throughout history, so I need not belabor the point, but there is and since the beginning of American history has existed a distinctly American personality. That personality has been celebrated in many forms for its self-sufficiency.
Second, those who study the archetypical man have identified him as an independent soul. An archetype is defined by Webster as follows:
1. The original pattern, or model, from which all other things of the same kind are made; prototype. 2. a perfect example of a type or group.
Going back to oral histories of primitive cultures, on through the earliest written documents depicting the differences between men and women, there has emerged an archetype for a man. Poets, artists, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, historians…all of these disciplines have divided the sexes into the two archetypes. The following chart developed by Dr. Herbert Agan summarizes the overarching bent of each of the sexes. It was taken from Dr. Agan’s course titled Psychology of Gender from The University of Houston, which was recently filmed and aired over PBS television.

Over arching bent:
Men Women
hierarchical
competitive
mastery of skills
achievement oriented
aggressive
egalitarian
cooperative
receptive
relationship oriented
process oriented
in touch with nature

I believe that our current state of affairs with men assuming the role of the enabler to alcoholic and the addicted family members in their lives, especially the women who they love, stems in large part from the above two deeply rooted archetypes. But here is the real issue; women are drinking more now than ever in history, as the following shocking studies indicate, and we men’s enabling codependent behavior is allowing them to die of their alcoholism earlier than their mothers or grandmothers.
As recently as June of 2008, a massive study was published documenting the increase in alcohol dependence among younger women since the end of World War II. Led by Richard A. Grucza, the researchers examined the National Longitudinal Alcohol Epidemiologic Survey (NLAES), conducted in 1991 and 1992 and the National Epidemiological Survey on Alcohol and Related Conditions (NESARC), conducted in 2001 and 2002. They compared lifetime prevalence rates from the same age groups and demographics, while controlling for age-related factors.
Women born between 1954 and 1963 were at 1.2-fold higher odds for lifetime drinking and those who drank were at 1.5-fold higher odds for lifetime alcohol dependence, compared with those born between 1944 and 1953.
“We found that for women born after WWII, there are lower levels of abstaining from alcohol, and higher levels of alcohol dependence, even when looking only at women who drank,” said Grucza in a news release. “However, we didn’t see any significant tendency for more recently born men to have lower levels of abstention, or higher levels of alcohol dependence.”
Grucza said these results shed more light on a “closing gender-gap in alcoholism,” due to higher levels of problems among women, while men have been more or less steady in their levels of alcohol dependence.
These researchers list five factors that they speculate have led to this jump in alcohol usage rates among women:
1. It became more socially acceptable for women to drink.
2. More women entered the workforce,
3. More women went to college,
4. Women were less hampered by gender stereotypes, and
5. Women had more purchasing power.
I am suggesting a sixth factor based on shorter-term more recent studies showing 14-22 women today matching their male counterparts in the use of alcohol, tobacco, and both legal and illegal drugs. We men, as police officers (see earlier blog post, “Why Grandma Doesn’t Get A DUI), attorneys, judges, physicians (see earlier blog “Doctor shopping Among Alcoholic Women), and clergy, husbands, boyfriends, sons, etc. continue to run interference for the ladies. We have to stop that and allow them to experience the consequences of their increased alcohol and drug usage. Only in that way will those bottoms be reached, forcing more women into recovery.

What if Your Woman Is Having An Affair With Alcohol?

After having sponsored over 30 men through the years in Al-Anon I can speak with some authority about the universality of certain frustrations these men experience. One such frustration always involves their having to deal with constant need for sexual release. An addict will leverage any advantage to perpetuate his or her addiction. In a situation involving an alcoholic wife, the granting or witholding of sex translates into “final word” power, which she uses to easily control her enabling codependent husband.

In a very real way, the alcoholic wife is having a torrid affair with what she considers the true love of her life…her alcohol. Caroline Knapp, a brilliant journalist before her recent tragic early death wrote a fascinating book titled Alcohol: A Love Affair in which she described how she felt about alcohol in the following quote:

“The need is more than merely physical: it’s psychic and visceral and multi-layered. There’s a dark fear to the feeling of wanting that wine, that vodka, that bourbon: a hungry abiding fear of being without, being exposed without your armor. In (AA) meetings you often hear people say that by definition, an addict is someone who seek physical solutions to emotional or spiritual problems. I suppose that’s an intellectual way of describing that brand of fear, and the instinctive response that accompanies it: there’s a sense of deep need, and the response is a ,’grabbiness’, a compulsion to latch onto something outside of yourself in order to assuage some deep discomfort.”(p. 58).

Last Sunday our minister delivered a powerful sermon on the topic of “Marriage: How do I live to honor and cherish?” He described the three kinds of love as eros (romantic or sexual love), philos (brotherly or sisterly love), and agape (totally unselfish love involving commitment and sacrifice for another). As I sat there in the pew I thought about what happens to a marriage when one partner loves their addictive substance more than the other partner in their marriage. That love leaves no time, interest, energy, or passion for any other entity. Sex and romance? How can that be with somebody who has drugged themselves into near oblivion? Brotherly and sisterly love? How can that be when there is the total absence of even the awareness that another human exists? Sacrifice for another? Is there any person on earth more self-centered than an alcoholic? Almost every man I ever sponsored eventually parroted back to me the same words I heard from my own first wife to rationalize her self-destructiveness: “…What do you care? It’s my body, not yours. I can do whatever I want with it.”

What a loss. Yes, addiction destroys the body, the mind and the soul of the addict. But it also destroys that fantastically beautiful entity called a marriage. As for the other half…the half left deprived of every form of love possible between a man and a woman, that loss will forever remain untold.
If you are a man who is enabling a woman to destroy herself with alcohol, please get help from a community resource such as Al-Anon (dial 1-888-4AL-ANON or access www.al-anonalateen.org), or reach out to any one of thousands of capable treatment centers, rehabilitation facilities, or hospital programs. PLEASE!

Women are drinking more today than either their mothers or their grandmothers. Read this for irrefutable documentation to this fact. Then read on to see if you see yourself described as either an alcoholic wife or a codependent enabling husband. Learn how being a REAL MAN today in America sets you up to play this role. If the shoe fits, learn where there is free help right in your own community. The lives you may be saving may be those of your entire family...including the woman you love!

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