August 22, 2019:
Yet there was a period after her marriage when I supported her financially. I was thinking I could take stress off her while she sought work and treatment. That was classically enabling. She relapsed the day she moved in with her husband. She was not looking for work, so that I was simply paying her to drink. When I called her on it she was cynical in extremis. "Yes Mark, I manipulated you," she said. "But jeez..." Meaning, You were an astonishing idiot to let me do it.
There was an element of the emotional-dependent version of codependency as well. I was terribly lonely, the house was silent, she was my friend, I believed we were close. Somewhere in my unconscious I realized that if I cut off the money the false friendship would die. It did. She raged for weeks, leaving drunken voice mails about how I was nothing, how I had no life, how I had to buy friends, but how we could be happy with that money and you never will. Her mother's daughter, there. In her inebriation she perfectly expressed the family entitlement. I blocked her number and I blocked her email address. Her final email reads, "So, we're no longer friends? I can live with that."
I'm glad she can. I hope she finds a way to one day become healthy. More than anything else I pity the man she married. He's a good man, he deserves better.