‘I got sober, and my marriage ended’
The last time I drank was September 2nd, 2022, but no one knows it yet.
Until now, I’ve kept my sobriety journey private for a few reasons. The first? I didn’t know if I could completely cut alcohol from my life in a world that shoves it down our throats at every turn. Finished work for the day? Wine down. Meeting your friends for brunch? We all know brunch is Latin for blackout. Midday bite on a sun drenched patio? Obviously this calls for an Aperol Spritz (or an icy cold beer if you have any class).
But the big reason? The one that’s made it almost impossible to casually discuss what’s become the clearest, most rewarding chapter of my life?
As my sobriety soared, my marriage crumbled.
I met my ex-husband working on a magic little sandbar off the North Carolina coast. If you’ve vacationed here, or on any beach in America, you’ve seen the signs to 'Rent Jet Skis', and hop aboard vessels with names like Fish’n Frenzy and Knot Today. Remember the movie Wedding Crashers, when Claire Cleary giggles at her sister’s cheesy, nautical wedding vows between captain and mate? Our lives were a lot like this—minus the cheese, plus the booze. We were two of the tanned, glistening twenty-somethings working in the wild world of commercial water sports. But underneath the Baywatch, beach body veneer lurked an increasingly casual relationship to alcohol that I began to question.
I found the water sports industry during a time of wild uncertainty. I’d been expelled from high school, had no plans for college, and had just called it quits on my life as a professional model—all before the age of twenty.
It may come as no surprise when I say the modelling industry is overrun with opportunities to binge-drink and pop pills and snort powdery substances—all free of charge. But what may surprise you is that I fit right in.
Days were for castings, go-sees, and photo shoots, while nights were for VIP clubs and all the booze- and drug-induced mayhem that comes with them. I was a hamster on a wheel of excess and depravity, ever in search of The Thing that would fix my compounding depression and anxiety. Of course I never found it, I just plunged darker depths looking.
Eventually, I left the industry and started over at a community college in my South Jersey hometown. Then came the summer water sports job, the normalcy I’d been craving, and the handsome, fun, boat captain boyfriend-turned-husband.
On the night of our first kiss, we were hammered.
A friend of my ex-husband's was in town, so a group of us gathered on board under the setting sun and took turns swigging from a warm bottle of iced tea vodka, a la Jack Sparrow and crew. It was a special occasion that lasted eight years. Still, there was something old school and romantic in the way we mimicked real pirates—singing and swaying and getting drink, drank, drunk as the stars came out over our chain of barrier islands.
Two years later, we were married and welcomed our daughter. Two years after that, he launched a small business. We grew in all directions, and for a brief moment, led a fortunate life in which work met play met giddy, hazy love. Through it all, drinking never wavered.
As he worked to grow his business, our marriage took a backseat. That, coupled with new motherhood and a raging case of postpartum depression, left me feeling lonelier than I believed possible in adulthood. Was angst not reserved for teens? I couldn’t grasp how one could presumably have everything, yet feel so deeply sad.
To cope, I drank—more and more. Girl’s Nights’ Out, which had once been just that, now ended in blacked-out nights on the beach with my girlfriends—bless them—where I began to express just how alone I felt in my marriage. With my boundaries utterly demolished by doses of alcohol fit for a small army, the girlfriends became a guy who simply wasn’t my husband, and in the remarkably harsh light of day, there was nothing to do but cop to it.
Of course these were cries for help and of course I could’ve-would’ve-should’ve just said to him: I’m dying inside and I need your love and attention, but what’s that thing about hindsight?
An obsessively introspective person, it didn’t take long for me to realise in my quest for deeper meaning, all I’d done was replace a glamorous life of excessive drinking and designer drugs with the down-home, country version.
I’d simply subbed one booze-soaked existence for another.
Assessing it all these years later, I see drinking, for me, had never been fun. As a teen, I stole wine from my family’s basement with my liberty-spiked, derelict friends. We’d get smashed on the train tracks late into the night, where I drank to blot out the mental health struggles that marked my teens and early twenties with in- and out-patient hospital stays all over the upper east coast for everything from anorexia to attempted suicide.
Mine was a case of Prozac Nation meets The Virgin Suicides, and alcohol seemed to quell my internal volatility.
But I’d become a mother, and mothers aren’t allowed to be that kind of crazy. Even today, as more and more women like me write candidly about the gargantuan impact motherhood can have on mental health—for reasons ranging from the unrelenting societal pressure to be the 'best mom' (an unrealistic and constantly moving goalpost exacerbated by social media), to unequal division of child-rearing responsibilities, to the physiological and hormonal shifts that occur when we carry and birth our babies—there’s still a taboo feeling around admitting that motherhood can feel impossible. It’s as if we’re not really allowed to be both mothers and women who struggle with the role.
So I put my best foot forward, shoving the darkest parts of me deep below the surface. Years of therapy and self-reflection allows me to state plainly: I’m smart and blonde and fit and pretty. Because of these things, it was easy to hide my problem with alcohol, and instead of facing anything at all, I officially entered my Wine Mom Era. Adorable.
The crafty ways in which I held onto drinking were condoned and supported by society everywhere I turned. From runways to boats to playgrounds, excessive drinking was a-okay and I always had company. The amount of beers I found in stroller cup holders far outweighed the number of lemon waters I stumbled upon when pushing my little joy around the neighbourhood with other moms.
The Center for Disease Control defines heavy drinking as eight or more drinks per week for women and fifteen or more drinks per week for men. We blew those CDC guidelines clean out of the water.
On and on we went, until the COVID-19 pandemic stopped the world just as it turned. Overnight, small businesses everywhere were ablaze with uncertainty as the president and newscasters everywhere instructed people to shelter in place. Shelter in place the people did, with lots and lots of booze.
In the first year of the pandemic, alcohol sales jumped three percent—the largest increase in more than fifty years, according to the National Institutes of Health, and about 25 percent of people drank more than usual to cope with stress.
But for us, the casual, bonus drinking was par for the course. It was the foundation on which we’d built our entire relationship.
Those first couple weeks-turned-months of the pandemic were a kind of free-for-all in which rules seemed not to apply. People everywhere Zoomed into their nine-to-fives without pants, while our work in tourism came to a crashing halt.
As the days grew more and more aimless, I began to consider my place in the universe. Why was I here? What was I meant for? Being holed up was both isolating and illuminating. Not only was I nowhere near where I wanted to be professionally, I was getting further and further away from it with every moment spent drinking versus doing.
As a child, I was an artist, a born thinker with a deep desire to extract meaning from everything. I considered the world and the people in it with unending curiosity, which naturally segued into my need to write. I believe writers are people who professionally pay attention, and yet after years of studying the craft, I hadn’t published a word.
I told my then-husband I had to stop drinking if I was to get back on track with my life goals. The depression I’d suffered as a teen was creeping back into my DNA, and I feared, as an adult, I’d have even less of a chance of surfacing if it were to take me under again.
He replied, 'Just drink less.'
Anyone who struggles with drinking knows that, for a lot of us, just drinking less isn’t an option. When I told him I couldn’t just drink less, that I really needed to quit alcohol completely in order to regain control of my life the way I needed to, he left me to it.
I started slow and small, downloading the I Am Sober app to track my progress, which meant that every time I failed, my relapses were right there in front of me. Restarting the clock made my heart sink and my stomach drop, and eventually I used this new addiction to my 'sober streaks' to rack up more and more time without alcohol.
Three days turned into three weeks turned into three months. I felt better than I ever had.
For the first time in my life, I used my addictive personality powers for good. I’m a huge proponent of using our presumed 'weaknesses' to our advantage. My default setting to want more, or the next thing, didn’t disappear; I just redirected my energy to crave more of what served me and less of what no longer added value to my life.
Drinking loads of alcohol had always been my way of fitting into a world I didn’t feel I belonged in, and despite how flawed the method, it was praised and supported by most everyone, most everywhere. Without the strange, chemical band-aid of it, I was stark naked in my fears. But staying in the discomfort—really owning and embracing it—became yet another superpower in my mounting collection of life-changing, sober glow-ups. The hours I’d wasted drinking I now dedicated to writing. I submitted my work in earnest for the first time in my life, and with this came award nominations, national recognition, and a literary agent in New York City. I finished my first book, began work on my second. Every area of my life got brighter and brighter.
Brick by brick, I built my new little world, often anxious but always sturdy in knowing it was the best thing for my daughter, my work, and myself.
Only one thing faltered in my sobriety: my marriage.
As my relationship with myself and my daughter grew stronger, my relationship with my husband weakened. I had to face the very real possibility that the only thing keeping us together all those years was our propensity for finding the party and keeping it going.
But we have a child, and I believed this warranted some sort of staying. Negotiations, at least.
I told him if we were to stay married, he’d need to consider a life without alcohol. But, having never struggled emotionally with substances the way I did, he didn’t see it that way, and our marriage dissolved.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve failed, like I wasn’t patient enough. But there are times when in sickness and in health is not a vow worth keeping, especially if it means losing your humanity. I had to put my health, my happiness, and my daughter first.
I had to show her that choosing yourself is paramount.
Today, my ex-husband and I co-parent as peacefully as we can, and I’m grateful for the roles we’ve played in each other’s lives. Even when I feel alone on my journey, I know I’m not. 'Women choosing sobriety is more on the rise than men,' says Amanda White, Licensed Professional Counselor and author of Not Drinking Tonight. 'It’s a hard dynamic… especially hard when people marry their drinking buddies and their relationship is based on getting drunk together, having fun, [and] going to bars.'
In my case, I’ve had to let go of the alternate universe ending, in which everything works out. Instead, I have more space than ever to be one thousand percent sober, and one thousand percent myself.
Here are some helpful tips from White on how to navigate a relationship when only one person chooses sobriety:
There are, of course, marriages and relationships that strengthen tremendously due to one or both parties getting sober. 'Some couples don't survive this, but the ones that do are honest with each other through the process and develop a shared commitment to make the relationship work even if things have to change, be rebuilt, or rediscovered again,' adds White.
With this in mind, if yours is a marriage or relationship that had to end so that you could begin, just know choosing yourself is always the move.
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