Dusty Newspaper Clippings and other mental disorder

You can stick your nose in, I don't mind. But I didn't break it off with Eduard because I'm some high-faluting moralist temperance crusader. Not to mince words here, but what he has is a rampant disease and it's going to kill him. I already see signs of physical damage in him. Until he makes the admission that his alcoholism is beyond his control and seeks help, there's nothing anyone else can do. The disease is out of my control as well, and any comfort I can offer him only serves to enable and accommodate his drinking. It makes me sad and I know he loves me, but I'm helpless here and forced to think of myself first. I'm not doing this to be arbitrary, believe me. But to be brutally honest, I cannot love someone who loves the bottle first.

I've thought about this a lot and struggled with it long before I broke it off. I sometimes wish I'd broken it off earlier because maybe it wouldn't have hurt him so much.