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A man who was given an ultimatum by his wife over his drinking habit has opened up about how it almost destroyed their marriage.

During the coronavirus pandemic, husband and wife Ricci and Alisha were among the many Brits who found themselves turning to alcohol to get through each day.

But as the months went on, drink continued to have a hold, causing ‘blackouts’ and pushing their relationship to the brink.

Speaking to LADbible, Alisha explained they both ‘loved to drink’ and they treated alcohol as ‘our way to de-stress after a busy day with the kids and our jobs’.

“I think a lot of people did that,” Alisha said of buying more alcohol once the pandemic hit.

“But it got to the point where we were drinking a bit too much, you know, when the party had stopped, Ricci and I would continue at home.”

Ricci also got into the habit of stopping at the shops on his way home to get himself a drink, and Alisha explained that Ricci would ‘always bring me back a drink too’ as it was his way to ‘give him that excuse that it’s fine for him to have a drink’.

Near the end of their time drinking Alisha would start to call him out on it, and Ricci said that bringing her something to drink whenever he came back from the shops was his way around that.

He said: “My way of getting that acceptance or allowance to drink was to bring her a drink also, sometimes before she could even see the blue bag I’d come in, I’d rush, I’d get the glasses out, pour a drink and say, ‘Here you go, darling, here’s a drink’.

“So without even giving her an option I knew that when she took that first sip, it was my ‘ok’, if you like, for me to go ahead and drink without her having a go at me.”

Alisha said she was the first one to have that moment of reckoning, explaining she would get ‘blackout drunk’ about once every three months and ‘hated it when it happened’.

She used to wake up in a panic trying to remember what she’d done and where she’d been, and afterwards tried to moderate her drinking.

This clashed with Ricci’s routine of bringing a drink home with him and making sure to get something for her as well, and he explained that even if he promised himself on the Sunday he’d cut down on the drinking, he’d still find a reason.

He said: “On a Sunday, I’d say, ‘Right, this is the week I‘m going to moderate and not going to drink throughout the week’. You know, I made loads of promises, ‘Babe, trust me, I’m not going to drink this week’, but then I’d find an excuse.

“It’s Monday. Nobody likes Mondays, I’ll have a drink. It’s Tuesday, Champions League football is on. It’s Wednesday, Champions League football is on. It’s Thursday, Europa League football.

“Before you know, we’re back to Friday. It’s the weekend, and I’d probably done this every week for about nine months to a year, and I always just found the excuse or found the way to just drink again.”

He also said that near the end of their drinking ‘our relationship wasn’t the best’ as he admitted that ‘some of the respect had been lost’ in the marriage.

He said: “Alicia would look through me, not at me. She wouldn’t have a conversation. I felt like she just wasn’t really interested anymore, and just living day by day.”

In the end, one time when Ricci was going out to the shops to buy alcohol Alisha gave her husband an ultimatum and told him he needed to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

“I said to him, ‘Look, Ricci, I do think you have a problem, and I think you need to go to AA meetings. Just go. Please. Just go’,” Alisha recalled.

She said that ‘Ricci packed himself off to AA’ (‘reluctantly’, he adds) and that even if ‘people say you can’t force people to go’ she essentially did, in their case it worked out.

Ricci told LADbible that his wife knew exactly what he was going to the shops to buy, so told him he could either go to the shop or go to AA.

At this point he said he felt ‘insulted’, thinking he didn’t have a problem since loads of people would go home and have a drink, but decided he would go to this one meeting and earn himself a few ‘brownie points’.

His plan was to go to the meeting, cut down a little bit for a few days and then get back into his old habits.

But when he returned from the meeting, Alisha remembers him saying ‘I can really relate to this I’m really going to try hard’, and he kept going.

Ricci adds that what really kept him going was his relationship with Alisha, saying: “When I went to the meeting, after the first two, three days where I said I’m not going to drink, even though it was a small period of time I could see that respect was coming back, she was starting to speak to me, we were starting to have conversations.

“I thought, ‘you know what? I can see things getting a lot better’.”

He described it as ‘a choice between the bottle or love, my marriage and my family home’, adding that the decision to stick with being sober was a ‘no brainer for me’.

Alisha said the first 30 days of her quitting drinking were ‘horrendous’, and that she didn’t fully realise how much it was affecting her until she quit, but around the 90-day mark, she felt like she and Ricci were ‘living a new life’.

These days, the couple run a podcast providing advice and guidance for people hoping to cut down on drinking or go sober.

As for some of the advice they’ve got to offer about going sober, Ricci says you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for help and support, and to take things one day or even just one hour at a time.

He remembered at his first AA meeting there was someone who had been sober for over 15 years and all he could do was wonder ‘how the hell did you get to that?’.

Alisha said you could consider setting up some sober social media since she used to open up Instagram and see her friends drinking, you never see people posting pictures of them ‘with their head down the toilet’, but a well curated feed can give you some advice and affirmation to get you through.

As for advice on helping a partner through sobriety, she suggested being mindful of what you’re doing around them, such as avoiding drinking in the house and trying to find new hobbies to do together that don’t involve alcohol.

Dry January is a campaign developed by Alcohol Change UK, you can find support and resources for taking part here.

Please drink responsibly. If you want to discuss any issues relating to alcohol in confidence, contact Drinkline on 0300 123 1110, 9am–8pm weekdays and 11am–4pm weekends for advice and support.