Nice-Biz Article Archive

Frank and Linda have been dating for five years. They met while enrolled in the same telecommunications class at a small, countryside, liberal arts college located in the Midwestern part of the United States. While they were mostly good buddies at first, they finally started dating when they were in their third year of college.

Due to the fact both of them came from very old-fashioned backgrounds, neither one of them drank much beyond the testing stage when they first started to date. As the time advanced, nevertheless, they began to go to more football bashes, happy hours, sorority and fraternity parties, and keg parties. Consequently, they gradually began to drink increasingly more the longer they dated.

After they graduated, they both found employment in a relatively large city that was about ninety miles from their undergraduate college. Then they finally determined that they would move in with each other.

With any important change in a person's life there is usually something that forces the particular transformation in question. For Linda and Frank the idea of having children and buying a new house was this "vehicle for change." To come to the point, for the first time in their lives, Frank and Linda started to critically review their abusive drinking and the long term negative consequences of alcohol on their lives. As an example, they began to wonder if they would ever experience an alcohol overdose due to their drinking behavior.

Would their excessive and abusive drinking negatively affect their ability to have children? How would they be able to continue spending most of their money on drinking if they were to begin saving for a new house?

From a different slant on things, even though neither one of them ever experienced alcohol poisoning, received a DWI arrest, or experienced alcohol poisoning symptoms, they understood that their heavy and hazardous drinking was becoming an issue that they could not disregard anymore. All of these questions without a doubt resulted in the same conclusion, namely that Frank and Linda needed to grasp the fact that they couldn't continue their heavy and excessive drinking if their dreams, hopes, and aspirations were to be attained.

Once they got to this conclusion, they told their drinking friends about their their marital plans, about their goal of buying or building a new house, and about their plans to start a family. They also told their drinking buddies that they still wanted to pal around with them but that they would be drinking responsibly from this time forward so that they could begin realizing their future goals, aspirations, and dreams.

Much to their disbelief, all of their buddies expressed relief because they too had been recalculating their lives and concluded that their life-styles were too focused on drinking. They also thought that they would have to change substantially if they were to become more accountable and show more concern for their careers, their goals, and for their health in the next twenty or twenty-five years.

After their candid discussion with their pals about their aspirations, hopes, and dreams, Frank and Linda in essence started to have more meaningful relationships with all of their friends. The fundamental reason for this was the fact that all of them had the same mentality regarding their heavy drinking and their relatively short and long-term plans, aspirations, and goals.