Husband a bystander as wife goes off rails

DEAR ABBY » I have been married for close to a year, and in this short time I’ve seen a side of my wife I’ve never seen before. Although I met her during a period of sobriety, she drinks now. The problem is what she does when she drinks. On one occasion, she was supposed to go to the market and return on foot. Instead I found her in a car with a stranger, drinking and high. She claimed it was too cold to walk and she was just trying to keep warm.

On another occasion, she got drunk and had a male friend with whom she’d been intimate in the past pick her and all her belongings up and left me watching her drive away with him. She later called apologizing profusely from a different man’s apartment begging me to pick her up.

Her latest is when she told me she put a “code” on her phone so I couldn’t find out where she had been. She says she loves me with all her heart and there’s no one else, but I find it very hard to believe. Am I the world’s biggest, dumbest doormat for not divorcing her? — Sucker Out West

DEAR “SUCKER” » If you haven’t already contacted your physician, schedule an appointment and be tested for any STDs your wife may have passed along to you after one of her escapades.

This scenario will continue until she comes to the realization that if she doesn’t immediately get help for her drinking, her marriage is over.

Loving her doesn’t make you dumb or a doormat. However, sooner or later you must accept that you can’t fix what’s wrong with her, and you’ll have to decide how much more pain you can tolerate. Please accept my sympathy.