Still in love

Dear Cary,

I love my boyfriend very much, and while our fledgling relationship (going on a year now) may not be perfect, I treasure it. He spent much of his adolescence abusing, and being abused by, drugs. He dealt drugs, he dropped out of high school, and he learned to hate himself. Several months before we met, he came to the decision that he hated who he had become, and he quit. The town he lived in is absolutely inundated with drugs, and there's barely a person in his peer group who doesn't use them. In order to quit, he had to isolate himself completely, since no social circle was safe.

The wisdom, strength and determination it took for him to make this decision were qualities I greatly admired in him when we met. Though I have never done drugs, they've played a terrible and destructive role in my life. I was able to completely appreciate the magnitude of his decision. I fell in love with him for many reasons, but what this action said about him was certainly one of them.

The first half of our relationship was long-distance and at times extremely trying. Then I found out that he had smoked pot again, once or twice. He confessed it to me in a conversation we were having about adultery. I made a comment about it being possible to be unfaithful to your lover on a similar level, without it being of a sexual nature. I used a hypothetical example of him abusing drugs behind my back. There was a long and horrible pause, and then he said, "I think I'm going to throw up."

It hurt like being cheated on hurts. It made me feel inadequate, betrayed and lied to. I cried so hard I lost my voice for a day.

He had told me the truth, immediately after I had casually stated that if such a thing ever happened I would consider it a total betrayal and probably have to break up with him. We talked about it, and he swore he would never do it again. He seemed to understand exactly how important it was to me and the reasons it mattered so much.

I'm not just some over-the-top anti-drug loon. My father became addicted to pain killers and, in the fugue of depression and self-loathing, killed himself five years ago by overdosing on the same drugs. My stepsister and childhood hero killed herself while tripping on acid when I was 8. One of the best friends I ever had died in a drunk-driving wreck, a week after confessing to me that he feared his friend's and his own chemical abuse was going to kill him.

Because of that, I didn't feel out of line when I told him that if he did drugs again, the second he swallowed, injected or inhaled, he broke up with me.

Now we live together, he's 1,800 miles away from that town full of addicts, and I've been slowly rebuilding my trust in him. But last night our friend and his roommate got into a long discussion about drug use with my boyfriend. Chad, the friend, went on and on about how he misses it, and when my boyfriend said, "You've been clean for two years. It must feel like ancient history to you," Chad replied that "clean" really meant just smoking pot sporadically. They kept talking about how good it felt and how much they missed it, and my boyfriend just sat there and listened, but the look on his face scared me.

In the car, I said something about being uncomfortable with Chad's substance abuse (he drinks heavily, it appears), and my boyfriend replied that there's nothing wrong with casual use. And I said, "Casual use isn't OK for some people, though." And he said in an angry voice, "Casual use is OK for some people!" I wonder now if maybe he thought my ultimatum before was only in effect while he lived in the drug-infested pit 1,800 miles away from me.

I'm scared and I want to talk to him about it. I think he's beginning to justify it in his mind, so that casual use is OK. But for him, they have connotations that are sad and terrible. This fear is gnawing at me, but I don't know if I have a right to bring it up with him, since he's done nothing wrong. Since he'd feel like it was an accusation. And if it happens again, and it's "casual," would it be wrong of me to end it? Either way I think I come off as an intolerant, uptight wench. I just don't want to feel the way I'm feeling.

Miserable

Dear Miserable,

It's strange how tragic pathologies cluster about certain people, how we repeat the tawdry melodramas of funeral homes and rehabs from coast to coast no matter how many thousands of miles we run, how always right next door lives the thing we fear the most, how once we're marked by suicide and addiction other addicts and potential suicides can spot us in a crowd as if "Fuck with me" were written on our forehead.

Well, it's strange and yet not strange; it's amazing and ordinary at the same time, like the turning of the earth.

The fact that your boyfriend quit in isolation worries me. I tried to kick alone once, in a hotel room up in North Beach, me and a typewriter and Mao's "Little Red Book." I've told the story many times, how I thought doing 50 pushups a day might get me clean, how a woman came along who was impressed with both the poetic nature of my habitat and the promptness and reliability of my drug connections, and that was pretty much the end of "Cary gets clean all by himself."

I'd strongly suggest that your boyfriend get involved in some kind of community of recovering addicts. Ironically, the first thing he'll hear is that "it's a disease of isolation." By trying to quit alone, he's playing into the hands of his pathology.

And you, poor young woman, can scarcely afford to watch a loved one die because of drugs.

Casual pot use might be OK for some people who are not addicts. Theoretically, it might even be OK for your boyfriend, if, theoretically, he was not an addict. But given your history, any use by him is definitely not OK for you.

When addicts are not healthy, or slipping, or chipping, or just getting caught up in their old addict ways, the words that come out of their mouths don't have any causal connection to their behavior. They're just a byproduct, like sparks thrown off by a grinding wheel. So don't get caught up in what he says when he talks about casual use. For an addict, "casual" use doesn't exist. It's use. Or it's not use. Mild use. Rare use. Occasional use. It's just use with an adjective chaser. Most addicts have a history of noun-modifier abuse. They shouldn't be allowed near pot, or near adjectives.

Watch what he does, not what he says. You should bail if he so much as looks at a joint.

• View blog reactions