Looks like the end

[haphazard]

I was appreciative but not swayed by H cooking the nice meal last night. If you can understand the difference. I engaged with the act of appreciating a nice meal well cooked. I did not engage with the wooing process that H was aiming for. He knew something was off kilter but didn't seem to have any tools to deal with it. He could not throw a hissy fit at me for spurning the lovely meal he had cooked. Counting the empties this morning we have 3 bottles of wine each with about a glass left in them, a can and a half of beer and an almost empty tonic bottle that I guess he used to mix about 3 G&Ts. I had 3 glasses of the wine. This is about double his usual daily intake.

Dom, it would have been lovely if H had cooked a normal meal for the two of us last night. That would have been great because part of the reason he did it was that we discussed the whole cooking issue and he agreed to cook on Saturdays. I know for a fact that he won't be able to maintain that kind of standard, he will get fed up start to resent me and we will be back in our usual place. He is also doing it somewhat defiantly to try and raise the bar of what I will cook during the week. The things I cook are stuff like bolognese, fajitas, bean stew, meatballs etc. All perfectly nicely prepared and edible. Just day to day family fare. But he thinks of himself as too good for that kind of food and deserving of better.

Lil, you are right that the nice stuff he does generally comes off as a desperate act designed to keep me from leaving him to deal with his own [censored]. The normal day in day out, week in week out, month in month out behaviour is pretty crappy. And I have been acting, to use Mojo's metaphors, dysfunctional cow with a hint of strong lioness mixed with weak bunny whenever the cow's had enough. By the way, I found an Alanon meeting very near me that meets on Sundays at 7.30 which is a pretty ideal time, so I'm going to start going. The more I read the more I learn that every part of his so-called personality is dictated by alcohol. There is a nice, decent guy in there somewhere and whenever I am reminded of that I feel guilty but it's not my fault he has switched his own personality for that of a drinker and it is not my responsibility to "save him" my responsibility is to myself and to my children.

The issue of the IUD cords is paradoxically helping me because unless that is fixed we won't have sex. To me this is now a good thing, I no longer wish to feel that post-coital after glow and make the mistake of thinking everything is going to be OK. Nothing will be OK unless and until H addresses his alcoholism and I can now see very clearly how I have been standing in the way of him doing that.

Fran