Hi Jajoso,
I don’t think you should feel obligated to stand by someone who’s destroying you, and especially not just because they’ve had one day of clarity and said they’ll change. It takes much more than that.
I can relate to a lot of what you’ve said. My partner started relapsing last May after 3 years of sobriety from cocaine. It ruined his life then and it did it again. I stuck by him after the relapses and he promised he’d sorted it, it was all fine. It wasn’t. He was hiding it, costing us thousands of pounds, and now I’m sitting in a house we bought in the height of his addiction (unbeknownst to me) without him not knowing how long we’ll be here as there’s no guarantee what he’s doing will work. I kicked him out just a couple months after we moved in as it got worse and worse. He lost his job and he was contributing almost nothing, every bit of furniture in here I bought myself.
After I kicked him out he started sorting things out – and not a moment before. He got a sponsor and just a week or so in, he said he had to ask me if I would stand by him during the recovery process. He knows now that that was wrong of him. He’d lied to me for a year, had me uproot my life with my daughter to be trapped in this house I can’t afford myself – and had the cheek to expect a commitment from me? Absolutely not. I made the mistake of letting him move back in after 3 weeks and he started lying again – he struggled with his new job with the triggers as work was where he’d used, and was secretly taking painkillers. I kicked him out again and he isn’t coming home anytime soon.
He’s doing really well but he’s at meetings every night and I’m at the gym, we go for walks with our dog most days and that’s about it. He wants more but his wants have always come before mines – not anymore. It isn’t enough to say you want to recover – let him show you. As the recovery process is long and chances are things might get worse for him before they get better. Mines was doing well and randomly took an overdose and got into serious trouble just a few weeks ago. And that’s months of meetings in, not just saying “I’m going to go to rehab” one day. He needs to do this for him and you need time and space to decide what you want. This is your life, and you aren’t obligated to spend it miserable.
You don’t have to cut it off completely if your mental health can handle still being in touch, but I found that boundaries really helped me think straight to try and heal from all the trauma in the last year. Maybe over time he’ll show you the progress he’s made and eventually you’ll end up together again. But maybe not. I just know that standing by my partner did nothing except cost me my mental health and well-being, I made myself ill. And it sounds like the relationship wasn’t entirely happy beforehand? My partner was everything to me before all this, and even now he’s still extremely respectful of me and me having my space. If he was anything else, I’d have turned my back without a second glance.
Make sure you’re taking care of you first and foremost x