“Loving Them Nearly Broke Me” – What It’s Like To Lose Yourself In Someone Else’s Addiction 

There is a moment in Widow Basquiat: A Memoir – Dua’s Monthly Read for June – where the artist Jean Michel-Basquiat, high on drugs, berates his lover and muse Suzanne Mallouk. ‘‘Don’t talk to me,” Jean-Michel says. “I don’t want to hear your voice. I hate your Canadian accent.” In a sing-song voice, he imitates her. The exchange is reported, like all of their exchanges, without editorialisation. We are not told, for instance, whether Suzanne is hurt by his dismissal. We are simply told that, afterwards, “Suzanne is quiet.”

The book is a critically acclaimed account of Suzanne’s life with the American artist. Written by the author Jennifer Clement, it mixes stream-of-consciousness description with direct quotes from Suzanne herself. The effect is chimeric – a text that resists easy categorisation and pushes the boundaries of the memoir form. Layering images and sentiments, Widow Basquiat creates an extraordinary account of Suzanne’s life, of her love affair with Basquiat and of the immense toll that addiction can take, not just on the addict (Basquiat passed away from an overdose of heroin aged just 27), but on those who love them.

It’s a dynamic that resonates painfully with others who’ve lived through similar patterns of devotion and destruction. Steph*, 33, finds the exchange all too familiar. “In a sense, when you’re dating an addict, you become the enemy,” she says. “You become the thing standing between them and their greatest love. It changes everything – and, in time, I think it changes how you see yourself.”

When Steph met her ex-boyfriend, she says that she was dazzled by the force of his attention. “He was so into me,” she says. “Really attentive and available, he would buy me expensive presents. If I’m honest, it was all very love bomb-y.” He was an artist on the up, she was coming off the back of a terrible break-up. “I was probably quite vulnerable,” she says, “because of this huge rejection I’d just experienced. And so, even though there was a logical part of my brain that said, ‘This is all too much,’ there was also another part of me that enjoyed the romance of it.” In the years to come, she would learn that addicts often fall in love quickly – and that his attention, which felt as warm as a midday sun, could be turned off as quickly as he turned it on. “And when you were on the outside of it, it felt just exceptionally cold and lonely,” she says.

A year before they met, he’d been in rehab, she explains. At one point, his addiction to ketamine had been so severe that he’d been hospitalised and faced the prospect of having his bladder removed (a frighteningly common risk for daily users). “He’d done a lot of therapy, he was very open about his struggles with addiction, but he was not completely sober when we met – he still drank. He said it was fine and that he was in control of it, though.” For six months, she had his complete attention and adoration. “Then, something switched.”

Steph struggles to name one particular thing that could have caused it: “Maybe it’s just that he felt he had me?” He started to go missing – at first, just for a night or an afternoon, though as the months wore on, days would go by. His phone would be switched off, Steph would call and message but hear nothing. “I felt so stupid and scared for him,” she says. “He was always adamant that he wasn’t using but he’d eventually turn up on my doorstep, broken-hearted, completely suicidal.” He would never tell her where he’d been, “he’d just say he was depressed, that he couldn’t cope. And because he was so distraught, I could never be angry, I just had to take him in.”

She wasn’t the only person to notice how erratic his behaviour was becoming. “I would get phone calls from different members of his family almost daily – they were worried about him. He was clearly unwell, he started pulling away from me and his friends, spending more time with a group of people who I knew did a lot of drugs. I think his family saw that I was good for him and they wanted me to bring him back somehow.” Unsure how to go about it, Steph started attending Nar-Anon meetings – support groups for the friends and family of addicts. “It was just a lot of people looking for answers. The common thread was this duplicity that made us all feel crazy.”

Though she thought about pulling away from the relationship, his family would often beg her to stay: “They’d say that he needs me, that he’d be lost without me.” The pressure of it, of being responsible for another person’s very survival, was itself like some strange drug. “I suppose part of me felt like I could fix him. I felt like if I loved him enough and was amenable enough, if I gave him the space and allowed him to come back to me in his own time, then he’d become the person he was at the beginning. So much of my self-esteem became wrapped up in the idea of saving him.”

It’s a sentiment echoed by author and slow living advocate Giselle La Pompe-Moore, whose relationship with an addict came to define her twenties. “The pressure to stay with him was crushing,” she says. “From his friends and his family – who’d say, ‘You can’t leave, you’re the best thing that’s ever happened to him, if you leave he’ll hurt himself, he’ll commit suicide’ – and from myself. He was my best friend as well as my partner,” she explains. “So I stayed, thinking that one day he’ll get sober. I hoped and believed that he would, and thought if I could just get him some treatment or some help, then he’d be the man that I loved, the man I’d get so many glimpses of when he wasn’t drinking.”

When he was drinking, though – as with Basquiat in Widow Basquiat – his behaviour could become outright abusive. “He would berate me in front of other people, find these ways to belittle me and to shame me. Like, he called me the N-word in front of his parents once (both he and his parents are white),” she says. “I felt so small. The next day when he was sober, he’d shower me with gifts and love and attention, with apologies and crying. He’d say that if I left him, he’d never survive.”

The constant shift between personas kept Giselle on high alert, bracing for the next emotional hit. “There were so many ways in which this experience transformed me as a person – from the fact that I completely deprioritised myself and what I wanted to the fact that I felt unsafe all the time; that I lived in a state of hypervigilance for years. On top of all that, I also felt a deep shame about staying. I thought, ‘What does it say about me if I stay with a person who treats me badly?’ For a long time, I didn’t tell any of my friends or family how bad it was, so I became very isolated by this experience as well.”

In a similar way, Steph’s identity began to morph around her partner’s addiction. “By the time we broke up,” she says, “I’d developed anxiety so bad that I was barely eating. I was just constantly on edge, constantly trying to find out where he was, what he was doing; wondering whether I’d ever see him again. I lost so much weight that my friends were commenting on it. My sense of self-worth was at an all-time low.” It wasn’t just the uncertainty or the blow to her confidence each time he chose drugs over her – it was the denial that made her feel like she was losing her grip on reality. “It was like I was going crazy,” she says. “Because he clearly was [using], he’d be out for days, he looked unwell, but he refused to admit it.”

The relationship ended when Steph learned, through a mutual friend, that he’d slept with someone else in their bed the night before she returned from a work trip. That betrayal snapped something into focus. “I had this moment of clarity – like, ‘I need to protect myself.’” For Giselle, the break came more quietly – but no less significantly. After a period of deep self-reflection, she quit her job, started therapy and began questioning the patterns she’d fallen into. “I’ve got my Saturn’s Return to thank for it,” she laughs. “It was a really quiet break-up. And afterwards it took a really long time to work out who I am and what I wanted because I’d spent so many years putting myself second.”

The last time Steph saw her ex-boyfriend was a balmy Sunday morning in London; she was drinking coffee at a street market with friends. He made a big show of coming to speak to her – he was effusively friendly, cracking jokes and acting as if they’d never been apart. He was just as she remembered him: charming, boyish, gorgeous. “He was really trying to get me to like him, to kind of get me on side. And I thought, ‘You’re like a child, I feel sorry for you.’ And then I just felt so lucky that I’d escaped.”

Addiction stories so often centre the person in crisis – their chaos, their pain, their spiral. But as Widow Basquiat shows, and as Steph and Giselle make clear, there’s another kind of suffering: the slow erosion of self that happens when your love is no longer enough to save someone. For Suzanne, the aftermath is silence. For Steph and Giselle, it’s the long, complicated journey back to their own voices. And maybe that’s what recovery really is – not theirs, but yours. A quiet return to yourself.

*Names have been changed.

If you, or someone you know, is suffering from addiction, mental health charity Mind has a list of resources offering support and guidance – find the full list here.