We alkies are really good at finding helpers.

We have a life project which can be difficult and daunting sometimes. There are hardships and setbacks, and terrible things happen, so we need helpers. This requires an amount of information management almost impossible to gauge, spanning networks of friends, work (if we are so lucky), family, and romantic attachments. There is no time left over for any other human being.

We want people to know the things we want them to know. And we don't want them to know the things we don't want them to know. It requires tremendous effort. But it is the only way we can keep the life project on track.

The life project of course is to drink as much booze and do as many drugs as is humanly possible without dying, or scaring away our helpers, thereby interrupting the life project.

You are just a helper. Please understand that. If you go, he will find another.

Save yourself. Go to Al-Anon if you need some real support.

have been borderline personality disorder types.

Just an observation. No judgements, of course.

Wait, I can think of one exception!

Many years ago, I knew this homely, overweight, but nice, girl who used to drink at a dive in North Beach. She would buy a guy drinks and then offer him a ride home. Then she would offer to help him upstairs. When he had undressed and flopped drunkenly into his bed, she would already be in there naked ... and it was a "what the hell moment."

Was she a predator? Among our circle, score was kept. She only got me twice. Others succumbed more than that. If I ran into one of them, thirty years later, I might still razz him about it.

One of the saddest thing about this whole discussion is that by making these drunken women victims, it enables them to avoid looking at the effects and repercussions of their own drinking. Shit happens when you get drunk. Male or female.

As Ogden Nash once wrote:

"Candy's dandy,

But liquor's quicker."

That's what Oliver North, George Bush and the rest of the syndicate were doing when Reagan was in the White House. Drugs for guns.

I guy I know pretty well - a Bush-loving ex-marine - a military intelligence/DEA/war on terror guy - told me the KNEW the drug thing went all the way to Reagan & his VP, but they just couldn't prove it.

This guy should be on the unemployment line with Fredo Gonzales.

I'd be cut a lot of slack, I'm sure. Any good salesmanfigures out how to shape his approach to given individual very quickly ... and Madoff deliver an amazing return, too good to be true, year after year after year.

So he didn't have to be particularly empathetic ... or mirroring neurons ... or whatever. Money talks and bullshit walks.

And this just in: It was too good to be true. All those marks had it coming. I think they would be good subjects for a study in greed.

He just worked their sense of entitlement. It was easy.

and put these treasonous assholes in jail. He has the power to do it, thanks to the Bush junta.

They clearly want to the economy to collapse, so that they can regain power and continue their quest to disembowel what's left of the New Deal and create a permanent plutocracy/theocracy.

I would add:

Don't. Look. Back.

Normally, I can't stand it when people make little one-word sentences like that ... but i thought the gravity of LW's situation would allow me some slack.

Based on decades of observation, I can say generally than any negative behavior/attitudes that manifest themselves before marriage usually come to full fruition at a factor of ten, after the wedding bells have pealed.

This woman is violent psycho already. Your life as her husband will be hell. You will never measure up. Everything will always be your fault.

You probably should look at why you are remaining in such an abusive relationship to begin with. And why you are already buying into her poisonous diatribes.

Sorry man, but you are young. Plenty of time to find someone who loves you just as you are.

You remind me of what a bartender at the M&M said about why he didn't like Jimmy Carter way back when. "He's a Baptist. They'll fuck your wife all week long and sit in the front pew, pious as hell, Sunday morning."

That's you now.

There is no tumor. There was no divorce.

You have fallen for the time-honored lines of a cheater if full command of his deceitful powers.

Ladies, there are two types of men:

Those who cheat.

Those who don't.

I will add a third sub-category which is men who cheated when they were practicing alcoholics, but stopped once they got sober, although they were not necessarily still with the wife they cheated on.

If you are sleeping with a cheater, you are sleeping with a cheater.

Cut off all communications with this man, no matter what he says.

If you find yourself attracted to another unavailable man down the road, get some therapy. Or do it again, if you want.