The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:
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Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.
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Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.
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Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.
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Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).
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If this is genuinely how you feel, that one additional incident would end your relationship, you should probably break up with her right now. "First the man takes a drink, then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes the man." Once one begins drinking, it often becomes difficult to modulate appropriately. It is unrealistic to expect to marry a woman with an alcohol problem in a society where alcohol is common and available, whether that problem is primarily addictive or that use would lead to blackout, and expect to go through life never having a single problem. Odds are that she will at some point do this again. You can probably prevent it from being a serious problem, hopefully make sure she is safe, but to expect her to never touch alcohol again as a professional in America is probably unrealistic. Odds are she will drink again, it's just a question of frequency.
That said, given your overall description, I don't think you should or need to break up. You're upset right now, I've been there, but give it a few days and see if you still feel the same way. An issue once every four years isn't ideal but can probably be handled, you can maybe make sure she doesn't drink in ways that could put her in danger. Think hard about it, no partner comes with zero downsides or issues. I have a deliriously happy marriage, but there have been things (perhaps not as bad) that I could quite easily have called hard-red-lines and dumped her over.
I agree with your analysis the most. It might be reasonable to draw a fairly firm line that OP views getting black-out drunk as a very serious problem, but even then it should be expected that at least once every ~5-10 it could plausibly happen. If it's truly unacceptable, continuing the relationship is a waste of time. If the benefits of the relationship outweigh that, then continuing the relationship is worth it.
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