Linda and Frank have been dating one another for seven-and-a-half years. They met while enrolled in the same urban studies class at a medium size, country, liberal arts college located in the Western part of the United States. While they were essentially good pals 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 school" backgrounds, neither one of them drank much beyond the experimental stage when they first started to date. As the time proceeded, then again, they started to go to more sorority and fraternity parties, happy hours, football bashes, and keg parties. Consequently, they little by little began to drink increasingly more the longer they saw one another in a dating capacity.
After they graduated from college, they both found employment in a small city located just about fifty-five miles from their undergraduate college. Then they eventually decided to move into the same apartment with one another.
With any pivotal change in an individual's life there is usually something that produces the specific modification in question. For Linda and Frank the notion of having children and buying a new house was this "catalyst." Stated simply, for the first time in their lives, Frank and Linda started to critically evaluate their excessive drinking and the alcohol long term effects on their health. As an illustration, they started to wonder if they would ever experience an alcohol overdose due to their abusive and irresponsible drinking.
Would their abusive drinking unfavorably affect their ability to have children? How would they be able to continue spending most of their money on drinking if they were to begin saving for a new house?
From a different viewpoint, although neither one of them ever suffered from alcohol poisoning, received a DUI, or experienced alcohol poisoning symptoms, they understood that their abusive and hazardous drinking was becoming a reality that they could not "sweep under the rug" any longer. All of these inquiries plainly indicated the same conclusion, namely that Linda and Frank needed to get a more complete picture of the fact that they couldn't continue their irresponsible and excessive drinking if their goals, aspirations, and dreams were to be reached.
Once they arrived at this conclusion, they notified their drinking pals about their their goal of buying or building a new house, about their plans to start a family, and about their marital plans. They also told their drinking friends that they still wanted to hang around with them but that they would be drinking in strict moderation from this point forward so that they could begin realizing their future dreams, plans, and hopes.
Shockingly, all of their friends expressed relief because they too had been mulling over their lives and concluded that their life-styles were much too often centered around drinking. They also thought that they would have to change notably if they were to become more responsible and exhibit more consideration for their aspirations, their careers, and for their health in the next fifteen or twenty years.
After their candid chat with their buddies about their plans, dreams, and hopes, Frank and Linda in essence started to have more meaningful relationships with all of their friends. The primary reason for this was the fact that all of them had a similar mentality regarding their abusive drinking and their short and long-term aspirations, plans, and goals.
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