Frank and Linda have been dating for seven-and-a-half years. They met while taking the same applied accounting class at a medium size, rural, Church affiliated liberal arts college located in the Eastern part of the United States. While they were merely good friends at first, they eventually began dating when they were in their first year of college.

Because both of them came from very conventional backgrounds, neither one of them drank very much beyond the testing stage when they first started to date. As the time progressed, nonetheless, they started to go to more sorority and fraternity parties, happy hours, keg parties, and football bashes. As a consequence, they in a step-by-step fashion began to drink increasingly more the longer they dated.

After they graduated, they both found employment in a large city located just about seventy miles from their undergraduate college. Then they at long last made up their mind to move into the same apartment with one another.

With any important alteration in an individual's life there is often something that causes the specific change in question. For Frank and Linda the notion of having children and buying a new house was this "vehicle for change." To put it simply, for the first time in their lives, Linda and Frank began to critically assess their hazardous and irresponsible 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 excessive and irresponsible drinking.

Would their abusive 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 start saving for a new house?

From a different viewpoint, although neither one of them ever suffered from alcohol poisoning, received a DUI, or experienced alcohol poisoning symptoms, they understood that their abusive and heavy drinking was becoming a reality that they could not "sweep under the rug" anymore. All of these uncertainties clearly pointed to the same conclusion, namely that Frank and Linda needed to get a more complete picture of the fact that they couldn't maintain their irresponsible drinking if their aspirations, dreams, and goals were to be realized.

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

Much to their surprise, all of their pals expressed relief because they too had been reexamining their lives and concluded that their life-styles were totally focused on drinking. They also felt that they would have to change notably if they were to become more mature and display more care for their health, their careers, and for their goals in the next ten or fifteen years.

After their candid chat with their pals about their dreams, aspirations, and hopes, Linda and Frank basically started to have more significant relationships with all of their buddies. The main reason for this was the fact that all of them had the same frame of mind regarding their irresponsible and abusive drinking and their short and long-term aspirations, goals, and plans.