For the person at home
You are not the one drinking. You are the one managing it.
You know the sound of the fridge door at eleven. You know which bin the bottles go in, and you know how many were in it. You have a version of the week you give other people. This site is for the version you have not said out loud.
It is rarely one problem. If you suspect yours is connected to more than this, start at contented.guide, where the twenty guides join up.
Who this is for
The person who lives with the drinking. Wife, husband, partner, the one who shares the bed and the bills and the front door. Not the mother two hundred miles away and not the friend who is worried — they have their own doors, and both are named at the foot of this page.
The difference matters. You cannot end the conversation and go home. You are already home.
You are probably further into this than you have told anybody. You have a version you give at work, a shorter one you give his family, and the real one you have not said out loud.
Before anything else
Living with a drinker and living with danger are two different situations, and most of the harm done to people in your position comes from advice that cannot tell them apart. If you are frightened of him, if you have been hurt, if you are kept short of money, stopped from leaving or told you are imagining it, or if a child is not safe, then this has stopped being a drinking question. Where that line sits is a page of its own, and the safety page says what to do.
You do not have to be certain before you are allowed help.
What this site does not do
It does not tell you to leave. It does not tell you to stay. That is your decision, with your facts, and you are the one who carries the cost of getting it wrong — which is exactly why nobody else should be making it for you.
It will not diagnose him from your description. It will not tell you whether he is an alcoholic. It will not give you a script for making him stop, because there is not one, and anybody selling you one is selling you something.
It also will not tell you that you should look after yourself and leave it there. You have been told that. It is true and it is useless on its own.
What is here
Four pages, written for the specific hours they are needed in.
Tonight
He is drunk, asleep, or not home yet. What the next ten minutes need, and what can wait until morning.
What to say
The conversation, the timing of it, and the four sentences that never work.
The line
Where a drink problem becomes a safety problem, said plainly, without asking you to prove it.
The children
What they already know, what to tell them, and what not to make them carry.
Why this is written by the drinker
James drank daily from eighteen to forty-five, went into residential treatment in Cheshire in June 2020, and has not drunk since. That is the wrong way round for you, and it is worth saying rather than hiding.
What it means is that he knows in detail what was going on behind the answers a partner gets — the reassurance, the timings, the negotiated amounts, the half-truths that are easier than the truth. What it also means is that he has never sat where you are sitting, and he will not pretend to. He spent several years afterwards in Tenerife around people in recovery and the families who arrived with them, which is where most of what is written here about the person at home comes from.
No clinic pays for this site. No fellowship is endorsed. No referral fee has ever been taken from anyone. The vantage point and the editorial rules are both set out.
Talk it through
There is an SI guide on this site. It is an SI, not James, and it says so in its first line. It will not diagnose him, will not tell you to leave or to stay, and will not give you a script. It is there for the version you have not said out loud — at one in the morning, with him asleep, when there is nobody to ring.
It is not a crisis service and nothing here is monitored by a person. If tonight is dangerous rather than difficult, use the safety page.
The other doors
If you are a parent, a sibling or an adult child working out what to do about someone else’s drinking rather than living with it, theirdrinking.guide is written for that chair. If you love the drinker from a distance and you are the one on the other end of the phone, lovedone.guide is that door.
If he is the one asking what to do about his drinking, sober.guide is the right site, and its encyclopedia is where this network keeps the long reference material — withdrawal, the medication routes, residential against outpatient, how to tell a clinic from a broker, and the named family routes such as CRAFT, Al-Anon, Adfam and NACOA. It is free and it is not written twice.