What It’s Like To Be In A Relationship With A Gambling Addict: The Aftermath

It will be difficult to reconcile your own financial risk aversion with the gambler’s stupidity and recklessness. No it won’t be. It will be fucking impossible to reconcile that.

You’ll find yourself screaming ‘but-how-could-you-be-so-irr-es-pons-i-ble?’ at them, over and over again.

You will alternate between pitying the person for their unbelievable naiveté, and sheer bloody rage at the situation you find yourself in. 

The injustice will threaten to kill you. You have worked your whole life, maybe even been given odd chunks of cash from elderly relatives, you have saved for your children’s futures. And you find out it’s all been being syphoned off, possibly over years and years. And you knew nothing at all about it.

So on top of everything else, you feel pretty stupid yourself. How could you have been so careless, so trusting, so apathetic about your own and your family’s financial management?

You will be caught up in a whirlwind of regrets, what ifs and if onlys. What if you had checked the bank statements more frequently (ever?). If only you hadn’t trusted that person.

Are you guilty? You allowed an addict access to your hard earned cash — does that make you a dealer or a pimp? The shame is overwhelming. 

You hate the scheming deceiver with a passion that alarms you, you’re so nice inside, how can you wish eternal unhappiness on someone you used to love? Well, because that person totally screwed you over, that’s why. That person duped you and conned you. That person is a fake and a fraud. 

So, Cinderella, move on. Life isn’t a fairy tale. 

Fight back. Play the long term game. Get all your ducks in a row and then shoot.

Be determined. Don’t let the bastard take your soul. They’ve already taken everything else for fuck’s sake: your home, your lifestyle, your future, your plans to travel and study, your dreams for your kids, your financial stability. So you have to be determined that they can never get your spirit. 

Stick your game face on. Get work. Three jobs if necessary. Consider all your outgoings, rationalize, plan, change your lifestyle. 

Work your way back up above the parapet of financial disaster they dumped you in. 

There will be bad days. Days you want to smack the addict’s face in. Days you are full to over brimming with bitterness and injustice. You might even hear on the grapevine or via the kids that the person that pissed all your money away has got a new car, or has been seen eating in a restaurant, or is still not in paid work. 

You will be seething with anger, literally disgusted, betrayed (again) and resentful. You are working seven days a week and they are eating out and driving a new car? How can that be? The scale of the injustice will make your head spin. It’s not fair.

And therein lies the crux. It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.

But life isn’t. And you have to be able to deal with that.

It will take a long time. But you are honest and proud. You’ll show them. You’ll show them that in spite of their deception and monumental fuck up you will survive. You will not be broken by a stupid chancer that gets a buzz from chucking money down the drain.

Because if you allowed that to happen, wouldn’t that surely make you more stupid than them?