Wife relapsed with alcohol after 6 months sober

My wife (33f) and I (34f) have been through a lot together. She essentially got sober from alcohol about 6 months ago, and she was doing amazingly. She is my everything and my best friend. She was a functional alcoholic I would say… she works, pays her bills, is overall responsible on the exterior, but internally, she goes through a lot. She was dealing with her stress by drinking at one point, and it was deeply impacting our ability to communicate. The alcohol really impacts her in a way that she can become confused mid conversation and/or quickly forget things that just happened. She would repeat the same questions as if she forgot she just asked them. She has fallen asleep in random areas of the city and just generally has been in very vulnerable situations due to alcohol. Her safety also really worries me, and I can’t count on her to limit her alcohol intake so that she has her faculties about her enough to make sure she is safe. Alcohol interacts with her antidepressants and it’s just not a good situation. She has never been violent or anything like that, but she can become fairly verbally combative, and get confused easily (like I mentioned).

She stopped drinking and things were so much better. Tonight, she broke her sobriety and got completely obliterated while out with some friends. I just feel so devastated, but I’m also grateful that her one friend she was with contacted me so that I could get my wife an uber home.

My wife really has an issue with beer in particular, and when I helped her out of the uber she had an empty beer can fall out of her backpack. I asked her if she was drinking beer and she told me no, but then I asked what the beer can was there for. She then proceeded to tell me that she just had a “sip”, and then I confronted her and said that she just lied to me. We get upstairs into our apartment and she says “I only drank one”, so again she lied to me. I asked her why she was so inebriated, and she just looked at me like some kind of mental fog was rolling through her mind. She went into the bedroom and passed out on the bed.

Anyway, I want to be there for her and this won’t cause me to leave her but I don’t know how to honour my feelings about how this has impacted me while also making sure I am there for her. Any advice?

Posted Jun 8, 2026, 4:49 AM UTC

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