Happily Together In Recovery

By the time I arrived in AA, I had been burnt in all of my relationships (although I admit I lit the flame myself a few times), and I wasn't interested in ever dating again. At four years sober, I did start dating again, both in and out of the program, but I still wasn't very interested. One friend from my home group, twenty years my senior and recently divorced, used to join me for breakfast once or twice a week before our meeting, and we'd share our funny dating tales. Did we laugh! You know, after several months of this, we realized that our friendship could develop into something else. We began dating each other, and tried to take it slowly. We're still together, very happily, nearly nine years later. We learned a lot of lessons along the way. We learned that we couldn't belong to the same home group, and that only occasionally could we go to meetings together. We each needed to maintain our own program, and when we were in an AA meeting, our focus needed to be on the meeting itself. When we were a new couple, we were too focused on each other to get anything out of a meeting. We learned that in the relationship, our friendship was the most valuable thing we had, and that our romantic inclinations were secondary to the friendship. We learned not to call one another's sponsor. We learned not to try to sponsor one another. We learned to pray together. We learned to be honest with one another. We learned to cherish one another. In AA, we find lives we never could have imagined. I also found the kind of relationship I didn't know I could have. I think that if two people in the Fellowship keep their recovery primary and central in their lives, and have some solid recovery time behind them, they can date each other without disaster unfolding. While it is true that we are in AA because we have a disease that can wreak complete havoc in our lives, it is also true that we are working on a solution. As long as the solution, rather than our relationship, is central in our lives, we can achieve true partnership.