One of the biggest problems that comes with any kind of gambling is, of course, money. The great majority of players don't just fail to put anything aside at the end of the month. Unfortunately, many of them end up building debt.
There's a small group of players who gamble very often and still don't end up in debt. Not because they don't lose. They lose, and they lose a lot. Their income is simply high enough that the debt never comes.
There's another small group too: the players who only play what they “can”. They keep a tight grip on how much money goes to their habit. They're dependent, and they know it, but they manage it in a way only they understand. That doesn't make them an example. No gambler should be a role model for anyone, however hard he tries to keep it under control.
Neither the habit nor the pocket
This article is about everyone else: the majority, who can control neither their habit nor their pocket. That's where other problems start to surface. Problems that don't only hurt the person who created them, but also people who honestly owe nothing, and who end up having to live with someone else's mistakes. Someone they love.
If you live alone, with no children, no partner and no parents depending on you, the damage falls mostly on you. That's bad enough: we're talking about a person destroying his own life. But what happens when our decisions hit other people too? Children, husbands and wives, partners, brothers and sisters, parents?
This is where we go deep into the problem called gambling. And unfortunately, it isn't simple at all. It's far more tangled than anyone would guess.
What the family goes without
Problem number one: taking things away from the people we love. (You'll notice, reader, that I'm writing “we”. That's on purpose. I've been through all of this.) It's a sad thing, cutting back on what the family has, so that we can feed the habit.
Money meant for the house. For the children's education. For the bills. For the loan repayment at the bank. For a holiday, a night out, a birthday. Honestly, it's a shame, and it isn't fair.
What money can't buy back
But the things the family goes without aren't only material. This is where the deeper damage starts: in the relationships themselves, between the gambler and the people closest to him.
First, trust goes. Then communication goes with it, for a very simple reason: the gambler has to hide. He has to lie, and find excuses for what's happening. The statement that never gets opened in front of anyone. The phone always face down on the table. The “I'm working late”. The money borrowed from a brother or a parent, with a story that isn't true. Every lie needs another lie to cover it, and after a while he's living two lives.
And the people around him change too. The partner who used to be a partner starts checking the bank account at night. Without wanting to, she becomes the accountant and the police of the house. The relationship isn't two people side by side any more. It's one person guarding and one person hiding.
The children? Nobody tells them anything. But they hear the arguments through the wall. They learn to read the mood the moment you walk through the door. Some of them quietly stop asking for things, because they've worked out that asking causes trouble. Children don't need to know the numbers to feel the debt.
The cracks in the family show themselves. Tension and arguments become part of everyday life. And in the end, relationships are tested so hard that the gambler loses people he clearly loves. Couples split up. Brothers and sisters fall out. The children of gamblers argue with them, and drift away.
The bill that can't be counted
So the price the gambler is asked to pay is unbearable. For the money, you can at least put a figure on it. Debt can be written down, and with time it can be paid back.
But what gambling does to human relationships? That simply can't be counted. There's no figure for a child who stopped asking. No instalment plan for a partner who stopped believing you. No interest rate for the years a family spent arguing instead of living.
And here's something I want you to hear: trust doesn't come back with words. “I'm sorry”, said a hundred times, stops meaning anything. It comes back slowly, with actions: a week of doing what you said, then a month, then a year. It's slower than paying off any debt. But it can be rebuilt, and it starts the day the gambling stops.
