Drugs or bad luck?

Hi Reddit. My boyfriend, S, and I will have been together for 3 years on the 31st of March. I can’t say enough wonderful things about him. I have never met someone who understands me as well as S does. He makes me laugh all the time about the silliest stuff, he loves people watching as much as I do, appreciates art and music of a rarer form, rolls the best blunts, knows to hold me when I am sad, and is one of the few people with whom I can have a complete conversation using only eye contact.

Our time together has not always been easy for a variety of reasons. I come from a broken family, and so does he. S has a very dysfunctional family and did not have any kind of female presence in his life after the age of 5 and so does not always know how to deal with me. We both have trust issues and at times can be very stubborn. In addition, he has been diagnosed with Bipolar Disorder as well as high anxiety but is unmedicated. In spite of all this, we have made a lot of progress over the last year learning how to communicate effectively rather than wasting energy by pouring it into a huge, ugly fight.

The main reason why our relationship has been so troublesome is because after our first six months together, we became addicted to opiates (specifically OCs) which were and still are widely available in our area. We would snort them all the time - before sex, to distance ourselves from our problems, to numb ourselves from our families and our pasts, to feel more comfortable socially, and just to get through the day. We were out of control, spending everything we had on pills and becoming slaves to our addictions. At the time, he was also moving OCs so they were readily available in large quantities whenever we wanted them.

After about a year of doing drugs together constantly, I stopped using and got sober (roughly 14 months ago). At the time, I thought that S was also getting sober. Flash forward to last August and I went back to school in DC, leaving S in New England. In September, he revealed to me that he has been shooting heroin behind my back for close to nine months. I was devastated, and all of my trust in S was shattered. S is very, very smart – probably the most intelligent person I know - and is also very, very good at hiding things when he wants to, which explains how I didn’t find out. I decided to stay with him because even after all of the pain he had caused me, I was deeply in love with him. I wanted to support him in his journey to sobriety and create a life and future with him.

Then, in October, he sought help, went to rehab, and got clean. After two months of being home and readjusting to life without opiates, S did what I had been asking him to do for nearly three years: he signed up for GED classes and got a (real) job at an oil change place ( he is very good with cars). I was very happy for him – finally it seemed that things were going his way and he wasn’t such a victim of his family situation as he has always been. Then, a month later (January) he was fired for seemingly no reason. While he was pretty discouraged, he kept attending his GED classes and about a month later, found a similar job at a different oil change place. Things were going really well for him there, and a promotion seemed imminent.

This brings me to today, when I received a phone call from S that he had been fired from his job. When I asked why, he told me that his manager had accused him of taking cash from a customer’s car when he was moving it for them. S denied that this had happened, and from what he told me, walked away from his job without too much of a fight when he had been wrongfully accused.

Anyone with an addict in their life would see these events as a huge warning sign, and while all of this stuff happening definitely makes me anxious, I am 300 miles away at school in DC and there is nothing I can do for S at the moment except to lend a listening ear and tell him to think positively about the future.

But I’m not really sure what the full story is. When S told me that he had been doing heroin in the fall, he completely shattered my trust in him. I have tried my best not to be an overly emotional, anxious, needy bitch about it and give him space and room to breathe, but it’s hard and I get very worried about him sometimes.

So here I am, nearly three years into my relationship with S and I am not sure if I am being lied to about his sobriety. I don’t understand how someone can be fired from two jobs in less than three months if they have truly done nothing wrong – it just doesn’t make sense to me. If I ask S if he’s sober, I know that he will say yes and I really, really want to believe him. But more than that, I want the full story and to understand what is going on. So, Reddit, how should I approach this?

TL;DR: (currently long-distance) boyfriend of 3 years cannot hold a steady job and may or may not still be using heroin – what should I do?