Frank and Linda have been dating for eight years. They met while taking the same finance class at a relatively large, countryside, private liberal arts college located in the Western part of the United States. While they were in actual fact good friends at first, they eventually started dating when they were in their third year of college.

Due to the fact both of them came from very conventional backgrounds, neither one of them drank much beyond the casual drinking stage when they first began dating. As the time proceeded, however, they began to go to more keg parties, football bashes, sorority and fraternity parties, and happy hours. As a result, they little by little began to drink more the longer they dated.

After they graduated from college, they both got jobs in a medium size city located around fifty-five miles from their undergraduate college. Then they eventually decided to move in with one another.

With any pivotal transformation in a person's life there is often something that triggers the specific adjustment in question. For Linda and Frank the idea of buying a new house and having children was this "vehicle for change." In short, for the first time in their lives, Linda and Frank began to critically appraise their abusive drinking and the long term adverse effects of alcohol on their health. As an example, they began to wonder if they would ever experience an alcohol overdose due to their hazardous and excessive drinking.

Would their heavy drinking unfavorably affect their ability to have children? How would they be able to continue spending nearly all of their money on drinking if they were to begin saving for a new house?

From a different viewpoint, even though neither one of them ever experienced alcohol poisoning, received a "driving under the influence" arrest, or experienced alcohol poisoning symptoms, they realized that their irresponsible and heavy drinking was becoming a problem that they could not "sweep under the rug" anymore. All of these uncertainties undeniably resulted in the same conclusion, namely that Linda and Frank needed to comprehend that they couldn't maintain their abusive and heavy drinking if their dreams, hopes, and plans were to be reached.

Once they got to this conclusion, they informed their drinking buddies 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 pals that they still wanted to hang out with them but that they would be drinking responsibly from this moment forward so that they could start realizing their future aspirations, goals, and dreams.

Much to their wonder, all of their friends expressed relief because they too had been reflecting on their lives and concluded that their life-styles were totally focused on drinking. They also thought that they would have to change radically if they were to become more accountable and display more respect for their careers, their health, and for their aspirations in the next ten or fifteen years.

After opening up to their pals about their dreams, plans, and hopes, Frank and Linda actually started to have more significant relationships with all of their pals. The primary reason for this was the fact that all of them were on the same wave-length regarding their abusive and excessive drinking and their short and long-term plans, goals, and aspirations.