The Last Time I Had Sex: The Woman Who Says Alcohol Has Destroyed Her Life

Anna, 42, is a private tutor from Surrey

He couldn’t get it up. After his three bottles of red wine and four whiskeys at a friend’s dinner party, I wasn’t particularly surprised. Rolling off me, his breath practically flammable, he slurred, ‘Sorry about that’, before promptly passing out, snoring loudly while I lay awake staring at the ceiling.

There are three of us in my marriage. Me, my husband Nick, and alcohol. And increasingly I feel like the interloper, the one looking in on Nick’s ever-deepening and destructive relationship with the bottle. We met in our late twenties in a South London pub. He was with his mates from the local rugby team necking pints and shots, and I was working my way through the cocktail menu with some colleagues. Drinking was something we both enjoyed, whether it was a boozy night out with friends or just opening a nice bottle of wine with a takeaway on a Friday night, more so the latter after our two children were born. Until about three years ago, we were both what I’d call typical ‘social’ drinkers. Alcohol was something fun to relax with, never a problem.

Then, in 2016, Nick was promoted. He works in the City and his job is highly pressurised. It started with him opening a beer or pouring a G&T almost every evening after work, saying he was ‘so stressed’ and needed it to unwind. I didn’t think much of it. After all, one drink a night is hardly a big deal; some evenings I’d join him and have one, too.

Yet then it became two. Three. An entire bottle of wine. Finding him asleep in front of the TV long after I’d gone to bed, clutching an empty glass and drooling. Fast forward to now and I believe he is an alcoholic, although he point blank refuses to accept he has a problem. He drinks every evening, and he’s always the last to leave any social event at the weekend, usually with me having to bundle him into the car and help him up to bed. But because he still has a job – in fact, he’s been promoted again recently – and brings home a good salary, we have a lovely home, the children adore him, and friends simply think he’s a bit of a party animal, he insists there’s no problem and I’m just a boring killjoy. It doesn’t help that he doesn’t get hangovers, he bounces out of bed in the morning and works out at lunchtime.

But it’s left our marriage on its knees: really I’m only still here for the children’s sake. They have a good life, they love him – too young to notice his drinking – and I can’t bear to destroy that. Sex, meanwhile, has become a distant memory. Either I’m too angry or upset to let him near me, or he’s too drunk to do it. It’s been 18 months since we last properly made love. Since then there’ve been a few attempts, but each time it falls flat. I think his drinking is making him impotent, but the one time I raised it he was so angry he didn’t speak to me for a week. And now I think, what’s the point – do I even want to have sex with him? I’ve had to accept ours is a sexless marriage – his affection is reserved for the bottle.

If you’d like to tell us about your last time – be it funny, uplifting, surprising or mundane – contact us at thelasttime@graziamagazine.co.uk