Outcomes of Alcoholic Marriages: Endurance, Termination or Recovery

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Abstract
Comparisons among three groups of wives of alcoholics indicated that the degree of economic, social and psychological deviance appeared to be related to the outcome of the marriage, with the separated families revealing the greatest amount of marital disturbance and the families with actively drinking husbands the least amount of economic and behavioral stress. Families which had remained together with the husband achieving abstinence tended to be upwardly mobile and concerned about socio-economic security. The majority of the abstinent husbands had been helped by Alcoholics Anonymous and their wives by the Al-Anon Family Groups; otherwise they tended to handle their problems themselves. On a series of questions on psychophysiological disturbance, wives of actively drinking husbands reported a higher level of symptoms than women in a representative community sample from another study. By retrospective inquiry, it was found that symptoms had decreased in the wives no longer exposed to their husbands'' drinking.

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