When I met [partner], he told me straight away, like our second date, that he’d previously had problems with gambling. I didn’t really know what it meant at the time when he was telling me. He was honest, and he told me this is what had happened in his past, but that it was fine, and he was OK now and it wasn’t a problem, but he had some debt as a result of it. And then two years sort of went by blissfully… Actually, I guess I was blissfully unaware. I didn’t have any reason to suspect anything, and it was pushed to the back of my mind.

I rang his phone and it went straight to voicemail… So, I texted his mum to see if maybe he’d gone there, if maybe we’d had a row or whatever. She rang me, and she just basically came out with it and said that she discovered that he’d been gambling again… I describe it now as like a jigsaw puzzle, it just came together in front of my face quite quickly. All I was thinking was, oh, that’s why this didn’t happen. That’s why we didn’t go on that holiday. That’s where that money went. That’s why I didn’t move in.

But when I saw him, I couldn’t speak… I was angry, I was upset, I was scared, I was worried. I literally felt everything I thought I could possibly feel like at the time. And I just sort of started asking questions about things that he probably couldn’t answer at the time. Like, is it true? Do you really want to live with me? Did you just do it to get away from your mum because your mum was getting suspicious? and they were all the kinds of things that were going through my head.

Mum let me buy a lottery ticket for my birthday and I won £10. And it really sticks in my head because I was allowed to spend it on holiday in Disneyland. And it was just something, that’s the only thing that I kind of knew about it. My Mum did the lottery, and she placed a bet on the Grand National once a year, and that was literally it…. So, I met [partner] in 2016, and before that like I say I didn’t have really any experience of gambling apart from the lottery and a bit of Grand National.

He’s never been well off. He’s always wanted to make his life better, and he always thought that money was the answer to that. And then gambling then became the answer to getting more money, or so he thought.

He sort of said that he knew he needed to go back to GA because it was the only thing that worked. He didn’t want to have control of his money anymore. He needed somebody to do that for him because having the money in his pocket made him feel really anxious.

There are times when I do feel frustrated about it, and it is something that I would like to see more support available for in the future, especially for the financial side of things because it is a big responsibility to take on. I have to make sure that everybody’s fed, and everybody’s got money where they need it to be, paying for school dinners and doing all the shopping within budget.

Although I acted on behalf of him in terms of dealing with the debt as it didn’t want to put that extra stress on him, he paid them himself with his own money and we repaid them back and forth. But I didn’t know if that was what I should do or even if that was possible or anything like that. So, I think the financial support is a big thing, too.

For the first few weeks when I was so unsure about what the hell it was going to mean for us there were definitely times when I was like, is this right for me, can I do it? A lot of it was doubting myself. I’m quite strong willed and determined, and if I set my mind to something I knew I wanted to be with him and if that meant that I had to be with him with this, then I would give it my all.

There were some disagreements then over contact with his two children with his ex because she was quite, I think she was hurt by everything because she’d been there before. I think his mum felt like he was better off at home, and maybe not with me. I didn’t understand why. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. And yeah, I think there was just a lot of tension, a lot of upset, a lot of anger from everyone, I guess. And just a lot of hurt. But I did choose to stay, and I have stayed and now we’re married.

His mum took control of his money. He moved back in with her. But then after a few months, he just got all his money back and then just went back to his old life essentially.

I do know from what [partner] has said that a lot of it is you feel like you need to fix everything, and that gambling will fix everything. And I think that sort of perspective comes a lot from the adverts, like what would it be like to be a millionaire on the EuroMillions? And the adverts are all glamorous and so wonderful and it’s in your face 24/7.

My daughter, she gets really frustrated about the adverts and stuff. And she’ll say, like when she sees the safer gambling message pop up really quickly, she goes, “oh, you barely saw that it was on for like two seconds”, but she gets quite frustrated about it.

I think they need to have some experience with gambling-related debts because and sort of like the things that you need, you know, the blockers on your accounts and those kinds of things. Because your general debt advice services, I don’t think have all that knowledge or have the experience to be able to provide you with that support.

A lot of it is a generation thing sometimes. You look back at how horse racing was just something that everybody went to and the lottery, well everyone does that, don’t they? And sometimes even now, [partner’s] parents and even my parents, to a certain extent will say, “have got your money back yet?” And he’s like, no, and I don’t want it back, like. “Do you still go to GA?” And he’s like, Yeah, I’ll always go to GA as long as I need to. You’re not broken and then you’re fixed, it’s a lifelong process. But I think the older generation don’t necessarily understand it.

I never noticed gambling adverts before, but since knowing that it triggers [partner], they now trigger me, and I see them, and we both feel uncomfortable. Those things are things that I guess people who have never experienced it before don’t notice and don’t understand. And that’s sort of a big thing is this understanding and this sort of social norm aspect of gambling and it just being something that people do. And children think that that’s just what you do.

He just looked awful, and he just looked like defeated…. The police were asking if he’d taken any drugs, how bad the debt was. And it was weird what the police said and it’s kind of always stuck in both of our minds that they said, “how bad is the debt?” And he said, “a couple of thousand pounds” and they said, “all this upset over a little bit of money”, or something like that, that’s what they said. And that was a bit strange.

At present there are more GA groups and there GamAnon groups, which baffles me because in our local cities there is at least one GA group per city, but there’s only one GamAnon group for the entire like district… And when you consider the fact that there are probably more affected others per one gambler… I feel like that’s possibly a stigma issue.

I tried to get some advice from some online forums for affected others and didn’t have the best experience with those. I found them quite negative places to be, a bit toxic, sort of very much leaning towards the you can’t stay with this man. He’s never going to change. You’ll never be able to trust him again. You’ll literally have to count every last penny that you have in the house and all these kinds of things, and it absolutely terrified me… I quickly came off those.

And at this point, I was starting to get a bit like worried. Gambling did not cross my mind. I was just thinking, maybe I’ve done something wrong, maybe he was angry at me for something…. I honestly did not know. But when he didn’t come home, then I was really worried. It was probably about 2:00, 2:30 when I realized that he wasn’t in the room, and I rang his phone, and it went straight to voicemail… we had to file him as a missing person.

We were quite lucky in a sense. I say lucky, nobody’s lucky in this situation, but the debt wasn’t huge. We didn’t have a mortgage. It hadn’t affected our house. We missed a couple of bills, but thankfully I had my student finance, so I was able to cover them.

I felt like the past sort of two years of our whole relationship with everything that we’d gone through and everything that we’d planned for the future was just a lie because it became apparent quite quickly how much he’d lied and to what extent he lied to cover up his gambling.

There were some disagreements then over contact with his two children with his ex because she was quite, I think she was hurt by everything because she’d been there before. I think his mum felt like he was better off at home, and maybe not with me. I didn’t understand why. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. I think there was just a lot of tension, a lot of upset, a lot of anger from everyone, I guess. And just a lot of hurt. But I did choose to stay, and I have stayed and now we’re married.

And we’ve really tried hard to change our change habits in our children, too, so we don’t let them go to the amusements anymore… But still, that can be tension too because [partners] ex-partner will allow his two children to go to the amusements when they’re with her. But when they’re with those, they don’t. Also, she took the eldest to the races recently, and we were very unhappy about that as you can imagine.

We don’t obviously do raffles anymore either or anything like that. We’re quite strict with it. That was my choice. I made a decision to not gamble anymore. And [our daughter] questioned it one time at a Christmas Fair, and I was like because that’s a form of gambling, and we just explain it to them.

He would transfer me half of what the bills were and then I would pay them all. And that first month, the money never came… and he was constantly making and excuses… I rang him having a bit of a rant about it like you do, for God’s sake it was really annoying. And I was working three jobs at the time. I was having to go to another job after work.

We obviously self-excluded from the sites that he was using initially but then quite soon after GamStop became a thing. So, we signed up to that pretty much straight away as soon as that came out, and we still do that now. Immediately after he’d [inaudible] he actually sold his phone in the pawn shop before he went to work in a desperate bid to obviously get his money back. So, he just got like a really old standard phone that had no internet access, no nothing, and he used that for quite a while and that worked quite well until everything sort of started moving more online.

We’ve used the GamStop, but we also have the iPhone content restrictions switched on. So, any content that’s rated 18+ is blocked from his phone. He can’t even download apps. It’s all password protected, and I am the only one who knows the password. So, if he needs to download an app, he has to ask me to turn it back on and then he can get the App Store app. I think for us, it’s always been a multitude of things, so it’s the control of the money, it’s the content restrictions. It’s just all those tiny little things that we can put in place. Every little thing is another building brick on the wall that stops him being able to gamble.

He sort of said that he knew he needed to go back to GA because it was the only thing that worked. He didn’t want to have control of his money anymore. He needed somebody to do that for him because having the money in his pocket made him feel really anxious. He knew he needed to self-exclude.

I tend to steer away from the forums because I find that they’re kind of like gambling hating people a lot of the time. I’m sort of a big advocate for the fact that everybody’s journey is completely unique to them.

We both sought some counselling I think through GamCare, we had that obviously separately. He really didn’t engage with it. He didn’t like it. He didn’t find it was beneficial for him. He found it quite frustrating. He took his Mum with him for a couple of sessions so that she could sort of see from his perspective, why he does things. I did complete the course. But again, I think for me, I think it was a case of maybe the right thing, but at the wrong time, because I was still very confused and not really sure what I needed to do… But we did it because we were both willing to try anything.

He’d gone to GA. But other than that, he was visited by a counsellor in the hospital when he was admitted after the suicide attempt, and they basically said, why did you do it? And he said, because of this and they said, Right, OK, are you going to do it again? And he said, no. And that was it. It was never followed up. I think he got some antidepressants from the doctor and like I say, he just went to GA. And he also at that point, he entered into a debt relief order for the debt because there was quite a lot at that point. So, he’d kind of dealt with it. The debt part of it was dealt with. His Mum took control of his money. He moved back in with her. But then after a few months, he just got all his money back and then just went back to his old life essentially.

We’re still on Twitter both personally, and we’re still both on there all the time if anybody needs us. We do message and try and do as much as we can…. And I’ve done a blog and we’ve done all these kinds of things together that we can, and we’ve built quite a good community there so I know that if anybody needed us or equally if we needed them for anything then we would all be there for each other.

We’re at a point now where we both feel open enough to talk about if we’re having any of that kind of worries or anxieties. Like I sometimes get anxious if he’s not communicating with me about things and he gets anxious obviously if I’m not communicating about money and like he gets a bit tetchy if he hasn’t been to GA for a while… We just take each day at a time. We’re not naive to the fact that in the future, there may come a time when this might happen again, and we could go right back to square one. We just literally just live each moment at a time.

I feel like we try really hard to see things from each other’s perspective so that I can try and understand. I do know from what [partner] has said that a lot of it is you feel like you need to fix everything, and that gambling will fix everything.

I find listening to [partner] talk and trying to see it from his perspective is so valuable to me in knowing how I can support him. And the same for him, to me… we felt like doing it together and being able to cross-reference that support was just basically getting the best of both worlds.

Our children play a massive part in our story, and we just we don’t know what the extent of harm they will have faced or if we’ll ever know… and we’ve really tried hard to change our change habits in our children too. So we don’t let them go to the amusements anymore. We discourage talk of gambling if they mention it… and the older to two know about [partners] gambling experiences now so they’re a bit more understanding of it.

Because he was furloughed so we were at home at the time…. But [partner] has really tried to be super proactive in helping other people on Twitter and in the online community. So, I think that really helped him. Obviously, physical GA meetings were off for quite some time, but they went online, and he did those every single week. So, in terms of his access to support, thankfully that wasn’t disrupted. And I think because we had so much going on at the time, and at home through the day, I think that helped too. I guess if he’d have had more time on his hands, maybe that would have been a problem, but it definitely was a worry.

There needs to be a wider availability of support services for affected others because at present there are more GA groups and there GamAnon groups, which baffles me because in our local cities there is at least one GA group per city, but there’s only one GamAnon group for the entire like district and that only had, I joined it in lockdown one. It was virtual, obviously, and they weren’t even having weekly meetings. They were just having a WhatsApp chat and a monthly meeting because there was only like five or six members, including me.

They need to have some experience with gambling-related debts because and sort of like the things that you need, the blockers on your accounts and those kinds of things, I think. Because your general debt advice services, I don’t think have all that knowledge or have the experience to be able to provide you with that support.

The financial support as well in terms of services. What I would have given in those first few weeks for some financial advice on how best to manage it.

Education reform. But I fear personally, I think it needs to come a bit earlier than what the current offering is. So, when you look at the statistics of how many 15, 16-year-olds are currently gambling or have got problems with gambling, I feel like it needs to come way earlier… So, working on those aspects, the money, the awareness, the risk vs. reward, those kinds of things that children can learn that will then help them with their future gambling behaviours… Money, finances, learning about debt and learning how to budget and little things like that I think need to come first before it gets too little too late which it seems like it is just now.