Promised not to drink and then did - help me think please….

Please help me think - I am 55F and been in a relationship for a bit over four years with my partner 58M and we have lived together for the last 2. Our start was rocky with him still messaging and indeed trying to hit on other woman at his work and his old friends and the common denominator was him drinking. He would drink and reach out to women - inappropriately. And this went on for maybe two years.

He even chatted back in forth to one woman in particular in a manner that he felt he needed to keep from me for one year at the start of our relationship and it was only that his phone threw up a message that I realised. I was also contacted by some female work colleagues to let me know he was being inappropriate and they felt uncomfortable with weird late night drunken messages - again this was in the first two years.

Look stuff happened and I just thought if he stopped drinking it would be ok. I am no angel and I used to drink before I met him - in excess, and I told him this from our first date - that I didn’t want drink in my life as it created problems but I kept thinking - but I love him and he will change - looking back this was dumb.

Four times we both promised that drinking causes problems for us both and on the last occasion it was because I was confronted by a friend of his who told me he had been hitting on her over the phone and trying to organize a get together the next time they met to basically have s3x - again he did this in the first year and I genuinely thought that the last time when this woman came forward and he promised that there would be no more drinking. This was a year and a half ago and I felt so embarrassed and confused at the time.

So you can see i have had big problems with trust and this is where was are now - I have just come back from a three day work trip to find he went out, bought and then drunk 5 medium strength beers while I’ve been away. He didn’t tell me but I found it in the fridge. He said to me that he had brought it up three weeks ago that he wanted to drink, which he did and I was so blindsided that I said at the time “Wow, we better talk about this, that’s a lot for me to think about”. He said he took that as a yes and that he thought he would just go ahead and buy some beer and drink it.

Frankly I’ve lost it - said I’m sad and disappointed and he claims that I’m making him ask permission to live his life how he wants to. He’s also said he feels like he’s always being monitored - which I am pretty stunned to hear as I have not mentioned any of this past since it happened.

Please give me any thoughts - if i let this slide and apologise and just patch the cracks wont it just make everything worse?