You're listening to the Love Over Addiction Podcast.

Thank you so much for agreeing to share your story on podcast today.

I am incredibly grateful.

Hi, thank you. I'm the one that's honored. I appreciate the opportunity.

Yeah, absolutely. Well, one of the things that we found really intriguing about your story,

and we're going to touch on this some more, hopefully, is the idea that you are in a marriage

with somebody who struggles with addiction, and for now you are saying, look, I'm here to stay.

I want to stay. I'm going to stay for now, and that's really interesting to us because

I think a lot of people in these types of relationships think that eventually it's always

going to end up with having to divorce or having to break up their partnership. So that's really,

really helpful. So let's start at the beginning, though, before we get there, which is,

how did you meet your spouse, and when did you know there might be a little problem here?

We met as a teenager, actually. Excuse me, we met at the same church. I was 13, really long,

that's ridiculous. So they even said that aloud, but he was 16, and I walked into the

youth group one night, and there he was. It was just like magic for me as a young girl.

I was more interested in him at first than he and me, of course, but for reasons of my own,

just pursued him until he started finally talking to me. We didn't go to the same high school,

so we had to pass letters back and forth between the friend of mine who went to his school.

But I fell hard for this young man. Really, I have a lot of my work in this recovery,

if you're looking into my own issues. I really didn't realize that I had so many,

until I started a program, and I say that as a good thing. That's not a bad thing.

It may have been, you know, uncomfortable to dig into those things, but really, you know,

...