When Relationships Look Different in the Light of Sobriety

I wondered if the bitter taste of the endings would overpower all the other memories of my first sober loves. I met C at the most inopportune moment imaginable: I was a full-blown heroin addict. He was not. We met on a video chat website called ChatRoulette, both of us drunk with our respective friends; he lived in California, I in New York. After a few months of daily phone calls and video chats I was head-over-heels in love and flew out to San Diego to meet him, doing my best to appear healthy and normal. I hadn’t told him and didn’t plan to. C was less a boyfriend than a hostage, an innocent pulled onto a rollercoaster he didn’t yet realize was brakeless. The only reason I was able to hide my addiction from him for a while was because he was so impossibly normal—he surfed, played guitar, had a tight-knit group of equally normal friends. What he saw in me, tattooed and cynical, I still don’t know; perhaps, like me, he needed something different. He’d never known any heroin addicts in his idyllic suburban life, so he missed all the tell-tale signs. Naturally he would think the marks on my arms were inflamed mosquito bites and not track marks, because who would lie about something like that? I’ll never forget the look on his face when he finally caught me. I get why using heroin would be unfathomable to someone who has never tried it. It must be near impossible to understand the kind of pain and self-loathing that makes heroin seem like a viable solution. By the...
Source: World of Psychology - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Addiction Publishers Recovery Relationships The Fix Love sober Sobriety Source Type: blogs