Just as you believe your love to be unique, you believe your problems – her problems – to be unique. You are too young to understand that all human behaviour falls into patterns and categories and that her – your – case is far from unique. You want her to be some kind of exception, rather than any kind of rule. If anyone had ventured such a word as co-dependency to you back then – assuming the term had even been invented – you would have laughed it off as American jargon. However, you might have been more impressed by a statistical linkage of which you were then unaware: that the partners of alcoholics, far from being repulsed by the habit – or rather, despite being repulsed by the habit – frequently succumb to it themselves.
— The Only Story (Julian Barnes), Loc. 1725–30