From a young age, he went where he wanted with who he wanted unsupervised. He talks about this very pivotal moment for him where I think his mum gave him some change and said, “Go and keep yourself occupied,” and sent him to the local arcade slot machine-type place. There was no you’re underage. He thinks he was about 12 at this time… He really attributes that was the beginning of addiction for him.

I started a relationship with them, didn’t know they had a gambling problem, and I think probably found that out maybe six months in. I remember them telling me, and looking back, I realised I didn’t really understand what that meant. I think about if he had said, “I have a drinking problem,” I would’ve had a very different reaction to what I did have where I just swept it under the rug and didn’t really treat it very seriously. Over this next period of five, six years, you come to fully seeing little steps of what that really means.

At the start of the relationship, so much of it was hidden. Even though he’d made that initial admission, there was a problem not really knowing what that looked like. The increases in, “Can I borrow money,” was a really huge thing. That just crept up and crept from these amounts of £20 to, “Can I borrow £100? I’ll give it back next month.”

We have talked about this… our first childhood experiences for sure… He had a father who had been to prison. His father was then around when he got out of prison, but I think after a period of time just stopped contacting [partner] while he was still a little child. Then I don’t know, eventually settled down one day and started a family in England. [Partner’s] perception is he was a normal dad for them and a good dad to them, but very bad dad to him.

He would say it isn’t actually about the pursuit of more money. He didn’t feel like there was ever a point where there could have been an amount where he would’ve been satisfied. He knew very logically, if I just didn’t do this, I would have a salary that would allow me to do anything that I wanted to do. I do not need extra money, but it’s more about this thrill of it.

I do really feel like it was a very iterative learning process of it starts out like he would ask me, “Can I borrow £20?” He’d be quite embarrassed about that. I’d feel like, “Yes, fine. No problem,” to eventually get into a place where they owe you thousands of pounds on credit cards.

He managed to convince me to take out a credit card. He couldn’t get credit cards. He was blacklisted off all of that stuff by this point. He does work for a bank, and so I think he was quite able to present himself as, “I know about these things and I know that this will be really good for your credit score. Actually, this is good for you.” I bought into that. Also, not to generalise, but my experience was his gambling problem did make him extremely manipulative. He was very, very good at persuading me to do things that would ultimately facilitate that problem, but I didn’t see it that way.

He had a friend who lend him £5,000 over the course of three months. They were in a position to do that but it was going like he would ask for £1,000 and come back two weeks later and ask for another £1,000. I know you can’t fully place the blame on that person, but I do feel a lot of anger of they knew he had a gambling problem and they still did that.

At one point in time his sister was being the person who would do a weekly– he would take a video of his bank statement and send that to his sister, that was the arrangement. Just after a period, she would initially say, “Where is it?” Then after a period of time, she stopped asking and then he realised, “I can make spends and she’s not actually going to ask.” I totally get that other people have their lives to live and there’s only so much time they can actually give to him.

Every time he made a purchase, I got a notification straight to my phone. The idea was then he couldn’t be withdrawing cash and he couldn’t be gambling on websites because I would know. That then became a very toxic thing, as you can imagine, where it’s not an intimate relationship. It becomes a managerial where I’m monitoring him very, very closely. Then the arguments that will come from that. I think that real damage to your ability to have a healthy, trusting relationship.

My experience was his gambling problem did make him extremely manipulative. He was very, very good at persuading me to do things that would ultimately facilitate that problem, but I didn’t see it that way…Some of the happiest days in those times were when I would comply. If he wanted money or wanted me to get a credit card, if I said yes, he was extremely loving then for a time. If I said no, then the complete opposite reaction of, we’ve got no money, so there’s not really any point in you being here because we can’t go and do anything.

The advertising stuff does annoy me as well. I know people say, imagine this was a cigarette company, people would be so horrified. I hope that’s the way it goes that in the future, it’s looked at like tobacco companies and we just can’t believe that we ever had advertising.

A lot of the posts I see [online] would be talking about the failures of regulation, and about online games being addictive by design very intentionally. I get comfort in just knowing that other people see this problem.

He really was living no life at all. Worked from home, would be gambling throughout the day and everything while he was supposedly supposed to be working, but would work from home, clock off, play video games, all interspersed with gambling through the day.

I guess linked to that earlier point of it’s so crazy to me that people know that you’re a recovering gambling addict and will literally send you bets and things.

People just treat it so separately to drug and alcohol addiction. If there could be a societal change where actually people put those things all on the same level. Even things like in work, people talk about, oh, I love gambling. I’ve never spoken up there about the problems I’ve been through. I just think you wouldn’t get someone in work just talking in the same way about drinking is great.

In Northern Ireland when we were really trying to find support, I felt like there were things in England or in mainland UK anyway that we just didn’t have here. In terms of actual physical centres, I think was the– is it like Gordon Moody, looking for things like that. I know, is it in Manchester, you have a big new shiny support centre? If there was something like that here, that really would’ve changed our lives.

There’s a perception, when people imagine a gambling addict, of a certain type of person who perhaps is unemployed or experiencing poverty and those types of things. Because I think that people probably do think people gamble to try and get more money. Maybe that’s true for some people, but this concept of it can actually be anyone, and would you be surprised to learn that it is your friends that are in really good jobs or have these other things going for them, like have a family.

Even now, there is still some credit card debt. He’s been very reliably paying that off for a long time now and it’s come down from £5,000 to £2,000. There’s still £2,000 there. That is a really closely guarded secret. Nobody else knows that, and so that is something that I’m very ashamed of.

Then I guess it gets to a point where he can’t stop doing it. He’s addicted, so he can’t stop doing what he’s doing, but you’re staying with him. You get to feel quite embarrassed and definitely a lot of shame. Then a sense as well of wanting to protect him. You don’t want your friends and family to know that your partner has this big problem.

I know it happens with other addictions, but people always come back to it’s a choice. Initially, when I did share things with friends and family, I know that they would express anger or frustration towards him because they very much felt like he’s choosing to do these things, he could just choose not to do it.

The more you keep it in here, the more you allow that fear to grow. The bigger the blanket it becomes over the addiction. Then, you just can’t find your way out. You can’t get to air. It’s almost like being under water, and you just sink deeper and deeper. That is where it’s so dangerous.

By maybe twelve o’clock lunchtime he would text me to say that his wages for the month were gone. Not in any kind of serious way that I ever saw but mentions of maybe it would just be better if I killed myself. How do you go on with this? Then I would have, obviously to that, huge emotional reaction, and I would run to him like, “Oh, let me try and make this better.”

The emotional impact is huge. I feel like I am very much changed in I’m really tight with money. I never was that way before. That probably is something I actually need to work on where now I’m quite ungenerous. I do just feel like that’s total trauma around money.

Things like your trust is so broken in that process I talked about where you learn, here’s one step or thing that he’ll do to be able to keep this problem going or to be able to gamble. Then that gets found out and you have a conversation like, we’re not going to do that anymore, or we can put things in place to make sure that doesn’t happen. Then there’s the next thing and the next thing, and the next thing. Your trust is systematically broken over and over again.

A lot of rebuilding friendships, high school friendships that he hadn’t– I’d been going out with him for five or six years and hadn’t heard of these people.

A real problem for him was signing up to GAMSTOP, but then just making another email address, using his mum’s name, his sister’s name, which I guess if there was some having to provide forms of ID potentially.

Learning that if you lend that person money for food, that they would take it and spend it on gambling, that was a first hurdle. Then escalations to learning they would steal your credit card out of your purse, for example, or use their family’s name to make fake email addresses to get loans and get all sorts.

[Partner’s family] have certainly had other experiences with him before I met him. Again, I’ve only had conversations where it’s been alluded to where they’ve had to go to court with him, I think as a student not being able to pay his rent, for example, and then having to go to court about that.

I guess I’ve scoffed at him, trying to encourage him to go to counselling and stuff and him not wanting to. When I sit and think about it by myself, I also have those kinds of thoughts of I know what the problem is. At that point in time, I felt like if I had gone to someone, they would have said, “I feel like you need to get out of this relationship.” I knew that, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it… What are they going to tell me that I don’t already know?

I haven’t done anything like that. I guess more generally I’ve never received counselling or therapy for anything. I guess this all just becomes such a part of your daily life in that creeping up way. As we sit and talk about it now, it feels like, whoa, actually, like that’s big. You’ve really been through something, but when you’re just living it every day, it’s just your life. It wouldn’t have occurred to me to speak to anyone.

There were half-hearted attempts maybe over the five years prior, but really nothing serious. I feel like they only were able to happen for the brief periods they did because he just simply had no more money left and was out of options. He’d asked all of the friends he could ask for lends. He’d exhausted me as an option. I don’t think it was an agency thing. It was the conditions.

At the moment, he has legitimately been more or less gamble-free for a year. That came about because I actually ended the relationship, just couldn’t handle it anymore. Then this brought about a really huge life-altering change on his part that included, yes the gambling has stopped.

Immediately after we had broken up and he was really not in a good place and was very willing to say, “I know that this is my fault and I know that gambling is the core problem,” he then accessed some free counselling through work. I think it did touch on the gambling problem a bit…In the points prior to that, I had really tried to persuade him to go to a group or go to a counsellor or someone like that.

In Northern Ireland when we were really trying to find support, I felt like there were things in England or in mainland UK anyway that we just didn’t have here. In terms of actual physical centres, I think was the– is it like Gordon Moody, looking for things like that. I know, is it in Manchester, you have a big new shiny support centre? If there was something like that here, that really would’ve changed our lives.

My Twitter is pretty active with gambling stuff… A lot of the posts I see would be talking about the failures of regulation, and about online games being addictive by design very intentionally. I get comfort in just knowing that other people see this problem.

Things are much better. Essentially, he is a very different person than what he was before. We do have conversations where I might say, remember when you said blah to me, or you did this, and he is like very embarrassed about that now and has this standard line of, but I was sick. That’s fine. We laugh about it. Borrowing money off me doesn’t happen anymore.

He doesn’t have a physical card, so there’s no ability for him to withdraw cash. Then there is this understanding that at any point in time I could say, show me your bank statement. He’s on GAMSTOP, but then he manually banned himself from every website he could think of. Again, the options are removed so there’s just not even the choice there.