A Young Couple Appraises Their Heavy And Abusive Drinking And Their Short And Long Range Dreams, Aspirations, And Hopes

Frank and Linda have been in a dating relationship for seven-and-a-half years. They met while taking the same criminology class at a small, rural, Church affiliated liberal arts college located in the Eastern part of the United States. While they were chiefly good buddies at first, they eventually began dating when they were in their third year of college.

Due to the fact both of them came from very old-fashioned backgrounds, neither one of them drank very much social drinking stage when they first started to date. As the time progressed, nevertheless, they began to go to more keg parties, sorority and fraternity parties, football bashes, and happy hours. As a consequence, they little by little began to drink increasingly more the longer they dated.

After they graduated, they both landed jobs in a small city located nearly ninety miles from their undergraduate college. Then they finally made up their mind to move in with one another.

With any momentous transformation in an individual's life there is typically something that forces the particular change in question. For Frank and Linda the thought of buying a new house and having children was this "trigger." Stated more precisely, for the first time in their lives, Linda and Frank started to critically assess their drinking behavior and the long term adverse effects of alcohol on their lives. As an example, they began to wonder if they would ever experience an alcohol overdose due to their hazardous and excessive drinking.

Would their excessive and irresponsible drinking negatively affect their ability to have children? How would they be able to continue spending nearly all of their money on drinking if they were to begin saving for a new house?

From a different line of reasoning, although neither one of them ever suffered from alcohol poisoning, received a DWI arrest, or experienced alcohol poisoning symptoms, they understood that their hazardous and excessive drinking was becoming a problem that they could not turn their backs on any longer. All of these inquiries undoubtedly led to the same conclusion, namely that Linda and Frank needed to get a more complete picture of the fact that they couldn't maintain their irresponsible and heavy drinking if their dreams, aspirations, and hopes were to be made real.

Once they arrived at this conclusion, they notified their drinking buddies about their their marital plans, about their plans to start a family, and about their goal of buying or building a new house. They also told their drinking pals that they still wanted to associate with them but that they would be drinking in strict moderation from this time forward so that they could start to realize their future hopes, aspirations, and dreams.

Much to their astonishment, all of their friends expressed relief because they too had been taking into account the direction of their lives and concluded that their life-styles were much too frequently centered around drinking. They also thought that they would have to change significantly if they were to become more adult-like and display more respect for their health, their careers, and for their plans in the next five or ten years.

After their frank discussion with their pals about their hopes, dreams, and plans, Frank and Linda in reality started to have more meaningful relationships with all of their buddies. The key reason for this was the fact that all of them had a similar perspective regarding their irresponsible and hazardous drinking and their relatively short and long-term goals, plans, and aspirations.