Is Addiction Ruining Your Marriage?

Addiction: it turns the most ordinary of people into unreasoning, selfish jerks — and dealing with an addicted spouse is easily difficult enough to seriously threaten any marriage. But what exactly is addiction? More importantly, if we get a good grip on what it is, can we discern which addictions can be overcome and which should be (lovingly) walked away from?

What Is Addiction?
There are a lot of different kinds of addiction, we’re learning. Forty years ago, it seemed you could be an alcoholic, a pothead, a crack junkie, or an opium addict, and that was about it. Today, people are addicted to everything from porn to Facebook, and it’s tearing marriages apart at epidemic levels. But the fact that Facebook addiction even exists in the first place calls into question a fundamental part of our notion of addiction.

In the 80s, the logic was simple: drugs chemically got all up in your brain, and they made you do things that “weren’t you” in order to get more. And that’s basically what most people are still told today, with the possible variation of “you have an addictive personality/brain chemistry problem” that makes you vulnerable to porn/Facebook/cronut/whatever addiction. But there’s something fundamentally wrong with that hypothesis as well.

In an extraordinarily eye-opening HuffPo blog post from early this year, Johann Hari wrote this striking line:

The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. It is human connection.

Why does he come to this mind-blowing conclusion? I encourage you to read the article in its entirety, but here are a few key points:

• Many people in hospitals are given diamorphine for pain, some for months at a time. ‘Diamorphine’ is the scientific name for heroin, and the kind they give you at the hospital is purer and more potent than the kind you can get on the street — but people who leave the hospital to return to their families and homes almost never suffer the kinds of withdrawal suffered by people who take heroin on the street.
• Many people in organizations like Gambler’s Anonymous suffer withdrawal symptoms from being unable to gamble — but they don’t inject cards into their veins!
• Nicotine patches, once lauded as the end of cigarettes, helped only a tiny proportion of cigarette smokers drop the habit, despite offering the exact same chemicals that smoking offered.

What Is Connection?
So if the opposite of addiction is ‘human connection,’ what does that mean? Exactly what it sounds like: it means knowing that:

• Someone else shares your passions,
• Someone else needs you, and
• Someone else has your back.

That’s it. There’s a short word for all that: teamwork. In short, the ideal solution to a situation of addiction, be it to pornography or to heroin, is to get that addict on a team, working on something they love. And that, in the end, is the primary determinant of whether or not an addicted spouse is ‘worth saving.’ If you and your spouse have something that you both love passionately enough to agree to forming a two-person team and committing to action on that subject, any addiction can be overcome. If you and your spouse have nothing left in common that you can team up on, it’s time to move on — and it would be, frankly, if they were addicted or not.

Is it that time for you? Call Gucciardo Family Law at 248-723-5190 — we’ll help you understand how to move forward from here.