Editor’s note: this piece deals with addiction.
“Happy is he who doesn’t drink wine!” Colour lithograph by T. Nemkova, 1990. Wellcome Images via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.
When we met, we were equals.
We were both doctoral students, three years into our programs. We met quite by chance and immediately recognized in each other the makings of a potential life partner. We were both passionate, driven, and confident, and we entered into a relationship right away. I joked that we were an Ivy League power couple, and I fucking loved it. But there were significant differences between us. My field is Slavic literature, unglamorous and underfunded; his is public health. I was an irreverent member of my department, while he was the star student of his. And he is an alcoholic.
Our relationship was mapped against the timeline of completion in our respective programs, our varying fates on the job market, and, more than anything, his inability to manage his addiction. He graduated into a prestigious post-doc with a tenure-track job lined up after. I was offered the one job in my field that year, but it was a precarious adjunct position, so I turned it down. It was a difficult decision under any circumstances, but by that point, I had a mindset that will be familiar to anyone who has endured gaslighting and psychological abuse in a relationship: I didn’t know who I was and I couldn’t trust my own judgment.
Loving an alcoholic is arduous. Deceit and manipulation come with the territory and it takes incredible endurance to forgive over and over again and/or incredible strength to leave. Loving an alcoholic who is a renowned expert on substance abuse is debilitating. Every time I tried to get out, a process that ultimately took two years to complete, he used the rhetoric of addiction science to shame me. And although lot of it was, I now realize, textbook manipulation, his scholarly reputation made it so that I still deferred to his judgment on these very matters. It was almost like he wrote the textbook.
There’s a shabby humility that comes with working in a shrinking field. Slavic Studies as it’s practiced in the American academy is a product of the Cold War and, at the risk of grotesque oversimplification, our prospects fell with the Berlin Wall. These days, the Slavists who, after adjuncting for years, make it to tenure-track jobs are a) extremely lucky and b) unerringly committed to the field. My own academic career was fairly ego-driven, from learning Russian in college to entering a prestigious PhD program. But I was realistic enough to realize that Slavic literature was not going to be my path to financial stability, let alone renown.
But the ego flourishes in a well-funded field, robust and growing with a sexy image. Obviously, undeniably, public health is a force of good in this world. These are the folks taking on the opioid epidemic, domestic violence, mass incarceration, the fucking pandemic. The profession is overwhelmingly populated by devoted, self-sacrificing researchers. But for those very reasons, it’s also a good place to hide when you’re spiraling out of control. It’s a culture that rewards 14-hour workdays, and those rewards—grants, publications, job offers—beget ever higher expectations. A culture where an acute mental health crisis can pass unnoticed by the very people who claim the ability to identify and treat one, claim the mandate to care. A culture where science and success can be weaponized against people who stand outside those particular constructs.
At least, that’s how it looked to me. But what do I know? I just read novels and poetry all day.
His relapse over the course of our shared dissertation year was dramatic, but the shift of power in our relationship started in small, subtle ways. We moved in together and I felt lonely, competing with his work for his attention. But I was selfish for even feeling that way, because all he’s doing is trying to help people. He convinced me that I wasn’t actually codependent, as my girlfriends had started cautiously suggesting, because actually that concept was largely misunderstood by the general public. He brushed aside my concerns when he stopped attending AA meetings, explaining that it wasn’t a science-based approach, the research really didn’t support its long-term efficacy. The fabric of his recovery started to unravel, resulting in increasingly severe lies and humiliations. When I didn’t want to be with him anymore, he accused me of “stigmatizing people with addiction.” He said I didn’t understand that it was a disease, that I was callously leaving a sick person. His addiction wasn’t a moral failure, but my inability to support him through it was. So I stayed. Through mood-swings, name-calling, theft of our shared money, infidelity, I stayed. Or, more accurately, I left many times, and many times went back.
Because through all this, his professional star continued to rise. Although he detonated everything in his personal life that year—his finances and friendships in addition to our relationship—he killed it on the job market. He was offered almost every job and postdoc he applied to, and his success seemed to validate all his behaviors and discredit mine. I left the library every day at five, saw friends, went to the theater, wrote “for a general audience,” while he stayed alone in his office until midnight. Was it any wonder which one of us got the gig? Never mind the fact that half those nights, he was drinking under his desk.
Many public health professionals, like social workers and therapists, are motivated by their own struggles with mental health, and some openly and bravely weave this into their practice. He never came out as a recovering alcoholic, instead approaching each reception or department party with the demurral, “I’m not drinking tonight.” So no one recognized it when he relapsed. And when he was working himself ragged, he was such a productive member of the department that no one questioned his habits. It was clear to everyone that he was on a trajectory for stunning success and I wanted that future with him. Being his spousal hire looked like my best bet for stable academic employment. During the darkest nights, violent and contemptuous, I still dreamed of a peaceful, shining day for us, married and tenured, when he would remember how I’d been there for him when he needed me the most. So, our equality was eroded, along with my self-confidence.
As he ascended to the ranks grad school taught us both to covet, he came to see me as a failure, and I started to too. I forgot the que será será attitude I’d once brought to academia, as I felt myself fall in his esteem. He never believed me when I told him about the job market for my field, how even our star students are relegated to years of Visiting Assistant Professorships. He thought I was lazy. And though I trenchantly defended my “healthy work-life balance” and begged for more time with him, I couldn’t argue with the results of his 14-hour workdays.
There was no place for me in his lifestyle or his future—despite the spousal hire he halfheartedly tried to negotiate and then used as a bargaining chip during fights—and no explanation for my experience in the scientific research he pointed to when pressed about his own behavior. So I looked for one in the place where I still knew my way around: literature. I read Mary McCarthy’s classic novel The Group, anonymously publishing an essay about my identification with the central character Kay, who is abused and eventually driven to suicide by her alcoholic husband. (The anonymity was originally intended to protect his identity, but it ended up protecting mine as well, because the essay ends with me triumphantly leaving him, when in reality, I was already back with him by the time it was published.) I devoured Leslie Jamison’s The Recovering, a memoir of the author’s alcoholism and an excavation of the myth of the Great Drunken Writer, and Nina Renata Aron’s Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls, a memoir of the author’s relationship with a heroin addict (to this day, I can hear my ex chastising me for saying “addict”; I should say “heroin user” or “person with an addiction to heroin”). Aron’s book also details the history of codependency as a concept, from the prohibitionists who were the unsexy counterpart to suffragists, to Bill W.’s wife Lois, offering coffee to the other wives while they waited for the men to conclude their meetings.
I looked for it in my research too. My dissertation was about a comic author who died at age 39 after a life of alcohol abuse. I became obsessed with the mythic drunkenness in his biography, and the damage it wrought on the people in his life. It was a strange parking place for my psychological pain, but my fixation on the author’s alcoholism helped me make sense of his lived experience and the lives of the people, especially the women, who loved him. This author had had two wives, marrying the second one while he was still legally wed to the first, a secret he kept from them both. In the secondary literature these women are described as pathetic, laughable creatures. His first wife—a sap who couldn’t handle his intensity. His second wife—a sap who didn’t know who her husband really was. And because he ended up in the literary pantheon, it was his version of these relationships, his cruel jokes about these women, that entered the historical record. Suddenly, it became crucial to me to restore the dignity of the women whose lives he derailed. No one on my committee knew why I latched on to this aspect of his life, and why, despite the impudence that otherwise characterized my scholarly approach, I insisted on taking seriously the author’s addiction. I was processing by proxy.
It turned out, when we stopped being an Ivy League power couple, there was no there there. His relapses became more destructive and harder to forgive, and I came to understand that I was looking in the wrong places for stability. Money, marriage, tenure—none of it guarantees security. I couldn’t tell you what the data says about an alcoholic’s chances for long-term recovery. But I sure know how it plays out in Russian literature.
It’s been about a year now, and I’m healing the parts of me that were broken. I’m regaining my equality—not with him, but with my former self: passionate, driven, and confident. I’m a braver, more honest person now that I’m not the partner of somebody who’s been labelled a star, and who avails himself of all the protections that label affords. I cut off all contact with my ex, but from time to time I still check his faculty page on the website of the university where he’s now tenure-track, like picking at a scab to see if it still bleeds. And there it always is, taunting me on his list of research interests: “Couples-level interventions to reduce drug use.”
