What Should You Tolerate in a Relationship?

I met my husband at the beginning of my sophomore year in college. I spent a month avoiding him. I ultimately succumbed to his humor and agreed to a date.

It wasn’t long before things evolved.

The man I once avoided had taken my heart.

I pictured a future with him. It caught me off guard. But what surprised me more were the words I uttered to him that first year. I’d never spoken them to any other man.

“You need to know something about me,” I said.

“What’s that?”

“If you ever make our lives about drinking I will be gone. It won’t be my choice. Something in me will disconnect. I will not stay.”

We never spoke about it again.

There was no need.

My then-boyfriend understood what I was saying.

We were both extroverted Irish partygoers. He knew I wasn’t telling him not to drink. He knew I wasn’t telling him how much he could drink. We both drank.

He knew I was telling him that alcohol could never interrupt our lives.

I was the adult child of an alcoholic.

My dad was a joyful, funny, smart, talented man, and I loved him. As my uncle once said, “You would be hard-pressed to find a person who didn’t like him.” But his addiction overtook him.

He left when I was 5-years-old.

He came back a few times over the years.

He was not a mean or angry drinker but he couldn’t stop. Our relationship was always incomplete. I didn’t feel damaged by his choices. But they did shape my life.

When my marriage took a hard turn, my husband took another.

The man who’d been a Steady Eddy drinker became unpredictable. His moods began to change. He began to act badly when he drank. Our marriage counselor confirmed what I already knew.

My husband didn’t have an actual drinking problem.

He was abusing alcohol while he was angry.

He was mad that I’d said it felt lonely being married to him. He was angry that I said it made me think of leaving him at times. The counselor told my husband I was sharing my feelings.

My husband called it a betrayal.

My words didn’t alarm him, they angered him.

No one is more surprised than me that I remained. I was shocked that I tolerated the behavior I once swore I would never allow into my life. I would never let alcohol interrupt my world.

I rationalized it.

I told myself he had no history of this behavior.

How could I leave him if he was in distress?

One day I was sitting with a few of my friends. We were all experiencing some degree of relationship issues. It made sense. We were all a couple of decades into our marriages.

My friend shared a story.

It was something that had transpired between her and her husband.

“I would never tolerate that,” I said.

In the nicest way possible she turned toward me and spoke.

“I would never tolerate what you’re tolerating.”

The three of us looked at one another.

We recognized our absurdity.

We recognized our hypocrisy.

We recognized our truth.

My third friend spoke.

“We’re all tolerating what we swore we would never tolerate in a relationship. It’s humbling, isn’t it? To realize how our younger selves professed our boundaries but we now accept the unacceptable because we love someone and have families with them.”

Marriage changes the rules.

The deeper in you get, the more you feel you have to stay.

The more you feel you have to tolerate what you swore you never would.

We do it for the sake of love. For the sake of our families. For the sake of a vow. For the sake of feeling there’s no turning back, nor a new path to seek.

And what we swear we will never tolerate may be uniform, or it may vary between each of us. It may beckon back to our family of origin, or it may just be something we have set massive boundaries about.

I regret tolerating what I once swore that I wouldn’t tolerate in a relationship.

My husband’s behavior exposed my children to what I sought to avoid. It may not have been in quite the same manner. But it still brought an unhealthy side of alcohol into the forefront.

I spent five years tolerating behavior I swore would make me run.

Ultimately, I did keep my promise.

It ran too deep.

There were other issues in our relationship. My husband had been diagnosed with covert narcissism on the severe end of the spectrum. But I had tolerated those passive-aggressive narcissistic cycles for years.

My husband knew what I wouldn’t tolerate.

It was the narcissist who chose to use that Achilles Heel to punish me.

And it was him who was shocked when I left.

But I had warned him from the start.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.