The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
-
Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
-
Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
-
Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
-
Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don’t like asking for random internet strangers for real life advice but I am going through a serious relationship problem and I really need some perspectives from people who don’t know me or my partner.
We are both mid-20s, together for quite a while, living together as well and starting out with decent careers as expats in . We are from very different cultural backgrounds (I am Turkish, she is Latina) but I always felt like we had good communication channels in English and I also speak her language. I am happy and she is too as far as I know. Actively having talks about future and children etc.
Now the issue. When we first met, there was a night out when we both got very drunk. My usual reaction to getting very drunk is to usually throw up, experience diarrhoea, be very uncomfortable for a while and swear I will never drink again. Never done something really embarrassing or regretful on alcohol. Turns out her reaction to getting very drunk is to basically have a full on personality change into a horrible bitch (her description), do very risky things, black out, pass out somewhere with no memory of anything that happened last night.
I was ready to never see this girl after that night but somehow I got convinced that she was genuinely regretful and this would never happen again. Meanwhile I know that her teenage years can basically be summed up as having constant mental problems and repeatedly doing things like this, fucking up her family relationships and academics until getting her shit together some years before we met.
Fast forward many years of never thinking about this stuff, last night on a small Friday evening drinks with her colleagues she has somehow done exactly the same thing and managed to drink herself to blackout drunk. I spent a horrible night thinking she might be dead or seriously injured or passed out in cold outside running around the city with some friends trying to figure out where she might be, and eventually the police found her on the sidewalk with plenty bruises and brought her home in an ambulance. Some of her things are missing and we will need to make sure she wasn’t assaulted or anything like that.
I am lost. We had a short talk in the morning where I made clear the relationship is over if she ever drinks alcohol again. Now she is sleeping and I cannot shake off this feeling that I am making a horrible mistake by not ending it here and now and I will come to regret this. On the other hand obviously I really don’t want to break up with the girl that I see as the love of my life when she is so vulnerable.
I can’t stop thinking that this bipolar—ish behaviour under influence and regular blackouts is indicative of a deeper mental problem that might come out in full force later in our life. Or that some parts of this stuff is hereditary and we will end up with horrible teenagers in 20 years constantly on the brink of drug addiction or whatever. I don’t know if these things make sense or if I am exaggerating.
My mind is in shambles and I don’t want to share this with friends or family because I don’t want her to be labelled as alcoholic or mental. I know in my Turkish friend and family circles this sort of behaviour would be seen entirely beyond the pale unacceptable. Maybe they have a point. I would appreciate any anecdote or perspective or even some medical research on the things I worry about.
I realised later that from my description her friend group sounds indeed very trashy and irresponsible but that’s because I was omitting some details which weren’t relevant in my mind at the time.
They did help her get home and in fact it was all supposed to be arranged with me that they would drop her at a certain train (this is happening at ), we would make sure she doesn’t fall asleep and another friend of mine would pick her up at the next stop. Things went south because of some miscommunication and confusion that made us think she didn’t get out at the correct station, even though she did. So we ended up looking for her in the next stations in the trajectory for hours meanwhile she was there all along and could have just walked home in 10 minutes. The whole time she was on the phone but too drunk to just send her gps location and kept confusing everyone with contradictory drunken information. Looks like she fell face first at some point and got the injuries that way. Luckily the police found her before things got any worse. All around a shit show but I don’t blame anyone.
About the friend group, they aren’t really friends but colleagues at her new work place’s DEI support group or something like that (yes these things are totally becoming normal in Europe too). So we don’t think anything non-HR approved happened there.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link