There was a couple that lived up the road. We considered them friends. On Christmas, they’d invite neighbors over in the evening for wine and cheese. We reciprocated on New Year’s with home-made eggnog.
My husband and I went for a walk in the evenings after dinner. On warm summer nights, on our way back home, we’d sometimes stop and visit with this couple. The man always offered my husband a beer while his wife offered me wine. We’d drink with them while we talked.
Then we realized my husband had a drinking problem. He started to get sober, for the sake of his health and our marriage.
The next time we stopped to visit this couple, my husband explained to them that he didn’t drink anymore. He thought they were friends who would support him. That wasn’t the case.
One Sunday afternoon, my husband walked over to borrow a tool. I decided to join him a few minutes later. As I approached, I overheard the man.
“Come on,” he said. “It’s just beer.”
“No,” said my husband. “I can’t.”
“Your wife will never know,” said the neighbor. “What’s one beer between friends? It’s mostly water.”
I didn’t know what to do. Should I confront them? Should I talk to the wife? I wimped out and walked back home and called my husband on his cell. I asked him if he was going to be much longer. He said no, he was just leaving.
When he walked in the door I told him what I’d overheard. He got a sheepish look on his face.
“Look,” I said. “You have a seizure disorder. If you don’t stop drinking, it could literally kill you. You know this. You’ve been hospitalized twice this last year. Did you explain that to him?”
My husband said he had.
“If this man can’t understand this and support you — is he really your friend?”
My husband admitted he felt pressured to drink every time he visited our neighbor, but he didn’t want to give up the friendship.
I didn’t want to tell my husband what to do. And I was also reluctant to give up a friendship that I enjoyed. So I went over there and explained to them how serious the problem was. That my husband had been in the ICU twice that year. The wife was sympathetic but the man refused to listen. He snorted at me and told me I was making a big deal out of nothing.
“It’s just beer,” he kept saying. “No one gets hurt by beer.”
I stopped going over there. That man was not our friend. It took my husband longer to come to the same conclusion. It took another trip to the hospital. He spent a week in the ICU.
He became much more serious about sobriety after that. He started to go to AA. He spent time every morning with meditation and writing in his journal. And he stopped visiting that neighbor.
Sometimes when you make the choice to be healthy, you will lose people you thought were your friends. When that happens, you have to ask yourself — were they really your friends to begin with?
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This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
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