Love, Lies, and Relapse: Dating Someone in Recovery

Love Isn’t Measured by How Much You Can Tolerate

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I didn’t know then that sobriety hides in gestures the way grief hides in laughter.

The restaurant was humming — low lights, mulled-wine December air — but her eyes kept tracking the shelves, cataloguing the threats. When mine followed, she looked down and traced the table’s grain, knuckles whitening at every knot. Later, I’d recognise that stare: a traveller mapping minefields only she could see.

Most love-advice books teach you to watch for the big tells; missing money, slurred calls, sudden vanishings. None warned me about the silence after a waitress asks, “What’ll you have?” or the polite panic that flickers across a face.

I grew up counting empty whiskey bottles the way other kids counted fireflies — first my parents, then both brothers — so when Rachel told me she was in recovery, I heard progress, not peril.

An ex-addict, I thought, was an upgrade: same depth, fewer detonations. What I didn’t grasp is that recovery rewires the battlefield, not the soldier; the mines just get buried deeper.

What I didn’t grasp is that recovery rewires the bombs but leaves them in the ground. What I missed — one landmine at a time