Edgar's therapist mentioned that Edgar's relationship with alcohol was the most important, the one he was willing to sacrifice everything for. My husband, Ed, dismissed the notion with a "don't-be-ridiculous" air that I knew well.

Accustomed as I was to going along with him — and probably because it suited my vanity — I dismissed the notion, too.

After Ed and I had been apart for some months, I listened to a fellow alcoholic, who was under the influence of something at the time, insist that he did not love booze and drugs more than he loved his wife and kids.

And I finally accepted my truth: His therapist was dead right about Ed's affair with alcohol.

Ed would disagree and tell me that his uncontrollable drinking was hell. I don't doubt that. But, as I told him, "I'd feel differently if you were being chased down the street by bottles of rum that threw you to the pavement and poured themselves down your throat, but it doesn't work that way. At some point you make a choice to pick up a drink."

I'm reminded of that Lou Christie hit from the ‘60s, "Lightnin' Strikes," in which he sang falsetto about being powerless to resist sudden attractions to women. He promised his girlfriend that one day he'd settle down and they'd get married.

But until then, he wanted her to stick around, understand.

It is perhaps unimaginably hard for an alcoholic to stop drinking. I don't know exactly why I've been able to do it, one day at a time, for almost a year and a half and Ed has not.

Many recovering alcoholics (and we're always "recovering" or "recovered"; it's kind of like being a pickle, you never go back to being a cucumber) say, "There but for the grace of God go I."

It's true what they say about alcoholism being a family disease; it affects everyone in the household. Perhaps my effort to recover from years with an alcoholic husband is part of what's delayed my filing for divorce.

I can ask somebody about this at Al-Anon.

But one thing I know now: My husband cheated on me with alcohol, and it still hurts.