Dear Sweet
First of all, I hope to encourage you not to leave this forum which is for Friends and Family only – in this forum ‘you’ are understood. I am not a gambler but I have studied the addiction and I have lived with someone with a gambling addiction.
On this site we have another forum for gamblers who are seeking support and who do want to live gamble-free lives but I know from my own experience that I did not find this forum helpful to me when I first joined this site many years ago. This forum is ‘you’, however, so I hope you will continue to post.
I cannot tell you whether to go on with your relationship, or to leave it because it is important that you make our own decision – this is ‘your’ life and nobody else should tell you what to do with it.
What I can do is offer you an ever-listening ear and a warm understanding. I can possibly tell you the pitfalls of going one way or the other but even these should not be your deciding factor.
If it was me Sweet, I would not marry an active compulsive gambler and move to another country with him where I would not have the support of family or friends. The reason I say this is because unless my fiancé could prove to me that has sought support and was not just telling me what he wanted me to hear I would be extremely unwise to trust him. Your fiancé has an addiction that drastically distorts his reality to fit his personal perception – he will almost certainly use lies and manipulation, as a means of getting what he wants.
When a compulsive gambler uses words like ‘I am cured’ he is either doing it deliberately or unconsciously to mislead those who love him and those who might enable him. Only with treatment and a long-term gamble-free period should a gambler be able to say, ‘I have taken control’ – but never ‘I am cured’.
When your fiancé says, ‘if I want him out of my life I will be the one to break up because he never will’ – he is putting the blame on you – but you are blameless Sweet, your fiancé’s addiction is not because of anything you have done or said. There is nothing you could have done or said that would have made any difference to your fiancé’s addiction.
Whatever your decision, you are not selfish. I don’t know what disease you are talking about in relation to you but I do know that your fiancé’s addiction is definitely selfish and manipulative – only ‘he’ can do anything about it. You cannot save him. The only person who can save him, is himself and there is no magic cure. Telling you that you alone hold his future happiness is untrue – his future happiness rests with him.
He can live a gamble-free life Sweet, he can live a wonderful life but at the moment, I am sorry to say I do not hear him saying the words that mean he is accepting his addiction and if he cannot accept his addiction then he is, in my opinion, not a man that I would trust. Words are not enough, words are easy. Facing the addiction to gamble means taking responsibility for your actions, not expecting others to do it for you, it means acceptance and action.
I hope you will keep posting.
Velvet
