u/-Atomic-Wrangler-

TL;DR stayed with an alcoholic for over 20 years and normalized the behavior for far too long

I am 37m, he is 41. I've been asking myself this a lot lately. I'm never really sure of the answer. Sometimes I land on "I was young and didn't know what a healthy relationship was", but I wasn't always young. Others, it's "I was pathetic and weak", and I stick to those more even if I don't fully believe that. The truth is possibly closer to ingrained codependence, despite the fact that we rarely saw each other. Then there's the obvious financial strain that only increased over the last decade- that's a bigger factor than I ever admit.

We got together when I was 19 and he was 23. He basically always traveled for work, and was home seldom. He had substance abuse issues from day one. They got considerably better for a long time. At a certain point, he started going for it again, and all the old behaviors came out. Rinse and repeat for two decades.

When he would go out for the night, that would be the kickoff point. Didn't matter if it was Friday night, Saturday night, Wednesday night... He would start drinking, and stop answering his phone. But over 20 years of this, my mind landed on everything you could imagine, from gang activity to infidelity. Infidelity is the big one obviously, and I was never sold on his denials. After all, if our roles were reversed, the behavior would not have been accepted by him. If I did that more than once- or even once- he would not have tolerated it. So why did I?

His excuses were always the same. He got too drunk and passed out. I never had any evidence of infidelity, but I also never knew what he was up to, and never believed his excuses. One weekend, I didn't hear from him for three days. I look back on this now and think, there was no bottom to my stupidity. After a while I just ignored it. Got used to the behavior and normalized it. Any attempt to approach the topic of alcoholism was met with anger and dismissal, so I dropped that too. Nothing I said for 20 years would convince him to stop.

We broke when I finally finished school started traveling for work as well, and learned that my life wasn't ever much different than when I was at home waiting for him, and all of my boundaries, limits, and fears were entirely self-imposed. And of course he couldn't stand it when I started dating someone else- I became the villain. And he never could come up with much of an excuse for what he was up to all those nights, so I didn't bother with his drama. That new relationship didn't last, but it did show me what I was missing and I saw the world with new eyes after that.

I just get so mad at myself some nights. I wasted my youth waiting around on that man to grow up. I became lonely and depressed and he never cared, and I should have left then but I was too weak. My pleas for him to find a job that would bring him home always fell on deaf ears. We didn't have kids binding us together. I felt like a kept pet, there for his pleasure but never mine. Why did I give him so much, when I knew even early on that I wasn't getting anything from him?

An effective chapter in a good novel works through the intended story beats while offering a sense of place, establishing mood, and providing characterization, while remaining interesting and compelling.

I can work through a lot of these elements, but I'm having trouble lately constructing scenes in a way that advance the story beats. I'm often uncertain on the best way to approach a scene, and sometimes think it's not interesting enough, and it rambles. I try to look at other writers, but I am sometimes unclear why they chose to frame a scene from the perspective of a specific viewpoint character, especially one I don't find very interesting.

How do you go about this in your own work? Are there techniques for chapter/story structure you're willing to share?