yes. yes. and yes... but maybe no. that's a lot of fucked up questions to answer but since you brought it up...

human beings are going to have problems which will manifest themselves in a never-ending parade of drama. the only faith i have in some therapy is that it demands one to look for the root cause of one's behavior rather than the behavior itself. the symptom is not the affliction.

i'd be pissed too for being forced to deal with that kind of situation. and to be honest, i did - my friend lived that night only to finish the job another day. fucking still hurts.

do your best to be giving and forgiving and demand that she face up to her behavior seeing as how you had to deal with it. ask the hard questions and do whatever you can to guide her to the source of the problem... but only go so far as you can without sacrificing your own well-being and sanity.

that's the best i got. i hope it makes sense in some way. good luck.

I just need one thing clarified before I comment any further than what I will now. When you say your woman is incapable of 'reigning it in', do you mean she incapable of reigning YOUR self-destruction or her OWN self-destruction. It isn't really clear.

What I CAN say is that it sounds like a toxic relationship and some neutral outside proffesional guidance might be the order of the day. If it's been like this for 18 years, that means that your situation is not helping to solve the self-destruction but rather to preserve it.

In my own life, it is not self-destruction but self-hate that I struggle with. My relationships have all failed rather quickly, and I can pin most of it on the fact that I tried to maintain the status quo. I tried to turn all the girls into my 'crutch' so to speak. While I could indulge in hating myself, they would say all the good things that in truth I needed to learn to do for myself. I avoided some honest, hard spiritual work and took the lazy way out and got someone else's 'love' to do it for me. Being someone else's crutch is draining and spirit-crushing. As a result, what I could have fixed 6 years ago, still haunts me now. Because the girls leave and the self-hate doesn't. You see how we engineer our relationships to support the status quo? Perhaps you can draw a parallel.

THanks for the responses. To clarify -- it goes something like this. My wife and I both indulge in decadant behavior. I know that I love decadence as an end in and of itself. It has some self-destructive consequences (liver damage, the girl we fucked calls the next day, etc, etc), but all I care about is exploiting life. She is as decadent as we, but I can't figure out why. I don't know if she loves the decadence, or if she's using it to cover something else. Maybe it's just that we go too far sometimes. The thing is this -- no matter how wasted I am, if she were to say "I love you, don't do this!" I might curse her out and scream, but I would never to it. Tonight, when she wanted to walk home on a road wihtou a shoulder, too drunk to stand, and I told her "I love you, please don't do this!" she punched me and hit me and told me to let her do her own thing. My optins are physically fighting with her or walking behind her and trying to flag down traffic so they don't hit her. I chose the latter.

Yes, we're mutually toxic. We are addicted to decadence, and drugs, and sex, and everything destructive. I just think our relationship should automatically overrride them. Does that make sense to anyone?

My friend, being self-destructive is not a good thing. It sounds like you both need to figure out whether it's pleasure or excess that you're after.

Historyteller-

Is there a difference?

um, yeah. don't take offense mr. historyteller but i don't think you know what the fuck your talking about... i mean that in the best way.

as for sin: that's some good stuff. i've been there in one form or another... that's not a "oh yeah, me too" kinda thing. i have nothing to prove and certainly not in this regard. i just know what you're talking about. no bullshit. why else would i be up at 4:30... waitaminit - there's plenty of reasons why i might be up now - but the truth is a little bit ugly.

you're not alone.

we've gotta play the hand we're dealt and love is the wild card.

(holy shit that was deep - i'm gonna quote myself on that one)

but seriously - i am with this poor girl who loves me madly and i'm a fucking specialist in the self destrucive behaviour department. i don't even get fired anymore. i'm functionally self-destructive. i've mastered the ability to narrowly miss rock bottom. unfortunately one needs to hit rock bottom before they change. ya see the pickle i'm in?

you've had a rough night. you better keep drinking.

i threw the jedi mind trick on my girlfriend (who has absolutely zero self destructive tendencies - besides her attraction to me) and she's sleeping somewhat peacefully. i'm stuck with the consequences of bad decisions i made days ago. fuck it.

this is what i told her this morning and it still sounds good to me: choose your brand of bullshit and live with it. there is NOBODY better. if you're lucky enough to find love the price is dealing with that other person's crap. the thing is, EVERYBODY has baggage or issues or whatever you wanna call it. deal with it. work through it. or end it and get to deal with a whole new brand of problems with someone else.

18 fucking years is evidence enough to me that you should exhaust every effort to tough it out and make it work. when the both of you finally get through this shit you should at least be ther to enjoy it.

jeeeeesssusss. uh, i um. geesh. that was a lot. it's always easier to offer advice to someone else... i need to deal with my own mess today. i hope i helped. good luck.

To clarify:
A pleasure seeker (IMO) does what they can to assure that they will have the most pleasurable experiences they can, as often as they can, for as long as they can. cf Hedonism.

Someone who is self-destructive doesn't care about the long-term and will party theselves out of house and home ... and sometimes into the grave, depending on how serious they are.

IMO (again), it takes a fair amount of self-discipline to be a Hedonist, while all it takes to be self-destructive is an audience. What fun is it to destroy yourself if you can't scar others on the way out? /sarcasm

If you've lasted 35 years, there's a good chance that you can do another 35. I don't think being dead, damaged, or incarcerated is any fun.

I think Historyteller tells it right.

Though he is much more optimistic, seeing that since you're 35 years and still not dead, you must be doing something right.

I don't know, I can't really offer any easy answers. Even if you left her, chances are high, that you'd just find someone like her. Sort of like how battered women always ened up with one abusive man after another never realising that the root of the problem lies within themselves (low self-esteem, victim's personality etc, bad social circle), rather than in all those men.

So...if YOU don't change yourself, you are not going to change what's going on with both of you capiche? And if you DO decide to make that change - you know as Histroyteller says, you can be decadent WITHOUT being destructive i.e. a hedonist - then you should realise that THAT could mean leaving your wife behind for a woman that suits the NEW you.

I don't know, maybe you're just having a bad night and there's lots of good stuff in your marriage that you aren't sharing.

Hope this gives you some food for thought.

I know where you're coming from, and I have a veto system set up in my marriage.

If I say no, then it's over period. To date she hasn't tested me on this.

I let her veto me too, with the exception of people I've been seeing for more than a year.

your entry made me shiver, i had a seven year realtionship, almost 2 of them married(in vegas) and it was a toxic relationship with self-destructive patterns that repeated, and when she left in spite of all my efforts to be sober and more positive, it nearly destroyed me and it erased the memory of any positive momnets we had shared, she left me to work at cheetah's where she met an investment banker who she is now sober and having a child with, intense emotional states brought on by intensive hedonism can lead to extreme shifts in persona and you always have to pay for those intensely beautiful highs with some equally intense lows, and reactions while inebriated are always more like the pattern of buckshot as opposed to single slug when you are sober, you react to many different stimuli and use more paradoxical emotions when you are partying than when you are sober, and the worst sometimes is when you are coming down and your abilities are the most depleted, in other words, i suppose, when its good it is amazingly fulfilling on multiple levels and when it is at its worst is when it has all gone too far and the bonds begin to unravel, you seem to have maintained the connection for a long time and that means that the undoing of it would be really painful for at least one if not both of you, i hope you are able to work it out and keep making it move on together, that type of drama just seems to be the by-product of that lifestyle...

A few days behind us and all is "well" again. The issue has been resolved in that I have told her to memorize the fact while sober that when she is drinking, I should have the type of "veto" power referred to above, just as I give that to her when i'm drunk. We'll see if it works.

I'm impressed with the responses. An interesting variety of outlooks -- from an interesting group of people. What some failed to see was that I was not questioning the delicate balance between hedonism and self-destructiveness. I'm accutely aware of it. What I was questioning was whether someone who has thus far been able to walk that tightrope has the right to judge his acrobatic partner when she slips off.

As for the values of our realtionship, as someone suggested, yes there are far more good things than the particualr night in question would indicate. We are best friends. We've encouragede each other to grow professionally, emotionally, and spiritually. We've seen each other through the hardest of times. We've explored the extremes of our sexual curiosity together. We would rather spend time with each other than anyone else. We've pushed our very souls to the limit together -- and once in a while, one of us steps over a line. On that night it was her (and I was under the belief that she does it more than I do -- which i still believe, but then I'm the one drawing that line).

Much wisdom has been shared here, and please believe that I've taken it all to heart -- even in those cases where it wasn't what I wanted to hear. Hopefully, my next journal entry will be on a more positive topic.

Al

that, my friend, sounds like you've had a good 'ol mouthful of life. to live without strife, pain or difficulty? hah, who calls that a life? grab the chalice (double entendre duly noted) with both hands and have a healthy swig. hedonism is not a weekend retreat. this kind of objectivity is not meant to sound flippant, I know how it can be in the heat of the moment. just remember to chalk all of this up, not to "Experience" (capital "E") in the trite sense, but to experiencing and sensing and, and, and...I'm rambling....

glad it worked out in the end...
----------------------------
Wretch, from thy virgin-breast this flame expel,
And soon- Oh cou'd I, all wou'd then be well!
But love, resistless love, my soul invades;
Discretion this, affection that perswades.
I see the right, and I approve it too,
Condemn the wrong- and yet the wrong pursue.

I missed the point???????

Shit, I *hate* it when that happens!