My wife’s drinking is way over guidelines but she never loses control. What do you suggest?

I’ve been with my wife for nearly two decades. During that time, food and wine have been things we’ve enjoyed for leisure. When Covid came along I already had concerns about my own alcohol intake and in the lockdowns we both went a bit crazy. Since then, my wife has worked from home a lot more. While my intake has peaks and troughs, she will open a strong beer every day at 5pm and she often kicks on from there with wine or cocktails. Yesterday it was a bottle of wine, although I didn’t have anything.
Her consumption is way over all published guidelines but she never loses control, she’s fun to be around, she’s always up to help our son prepare for school and she continues to excel in her high-pressure job. Drinking really isn’t causing any problems. My worry is that this could suddenly spin out of control and I will feel awful for not having done anything. Also, her family has a history of dementia and I worry it could exacerbate that.
Although she seems laid-back she is actually quite anxious and I know broaching this subject would not be well received. At the moment I am simply not drinking in the hope of lowering the benchmark intake in our house. I realise that’s a bit feeble but it’s hard to make a pre-emptive strike against a problem that isn’t there yet. What do you suggest?
Eleanor says: A lot of our cultural thinking around alcohol imagines two stark categories: there are the people with capital-D, capital-P Drinking Problems, for whom the only solution is 12 steps and to never drink again, and then there’s everyone else, who by virtue of not belonging to the first category are Non-Problem Drinkers. Your wife isn’t stumbling around drunk or missing work, so she doesn’t match our stereotype of the first category. But one of the problems with this stark categorisation is that, when you’re in a mildly bad relationship with alcohol, you can look at the AA-trope of “addict” and think, “I’m not that, so I must be fine.”
In reality there’s a whole spectrum of ways to relate to alcohol and our cultural expectations of “addict” are just one extreme end. There’s also the slightly-too-strong agitation if there’s none in the fridge. There’s forgetting what it’s like to start the day without a headache. There’s feeling real fear about facing a date without drinking. None of these involves slurring and stumbling and vomiting. But they’re ways to have a horrible hum under what should be a fun experience – the fact that you don’t feel you can talk about drinking, for instance, is a little bit of that hum.
It might be useful to pivot from asking, “How can I stop my wife drinking so much?” to, “How can we help with what makes my wife want to drink so much?” You mentioned she’s an anxious person. Are there other things in her life – besides alcohol – that take the edge off a hard day? Between the demanding job, the house, the kids, is there anything else that gives her peace and winding-down before sleep? If not, what else might work?
Maybe too you could make this part of a conversation about your joint health goals at this point in life. Set “relationship with alcohol” aside, set “telling me what to do” aside, there’s a simple non-accusatory case to just “get healthy together”. Drinking more than recommended means more than your liver can handle. Bloodwork and doctor check-ins can be good ways to find out about the cumulative effect of our vices “above recommended levels”, as well as a good way to get motivated to change them, just as how after the dentist you’re all motivated and full of joie de floss.
I know drinking can be hard to talk about but stealthy changes may just look passive aggressive. Trying to subtly engineer behaviour changes without explaining why – that’s what we do to children and animals. She might feel you’re treating her like that if you start stocking the fridge with non-alcoholic beverages, or saying, “Are you sure you need another?”
We bridle at feeling paternalised, especially about choices we wish no one would notice. If you want her to change her choices, it’ll feel altogether more dignified from her point of view if you engage with her as someone who makes those choices.
The trick isn’t for either of you to treat alcohol as a right, or as an enemy. It is to treat it as something to have around to the extent – and only the extent – that it makes your lives better. Grownups are allowed to drink for fun. It’s when drinking stops being fun that we have to pay attention.
This letter has been edited for length.
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