Early on in her sobriety in 2014, Alyson Marla Chavez attended a recovery-themed meditation class at the Milwaukee Mindfulness Community. She went at the behest of her sponsor and rolled her eyes at first. Then she caught sight of Joshua Robert Stewart.
“I realized, ‘Oh, there are nice guys at AA,'” said Ms. Chavez.
The two chatted over a tea break, but didn’t cross paths again until a few months later, at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting that spring. Mr. Stewart noted that Mrs. Chavez, who was having a particularly difficult day, seemed upset. So he offered to take a walk and have a cup of coffee with her when the meeting was over.
From then on, the couple began to spend more time together, both during and outside meetings. Though a deeper bond began to form, romance was not in either of their heads.
Neither Mrs. Chavez nor Mr. Stewart made their first attempt at sobriety, but both were then determined to make it last. That meant following the guidelines of Alcoholics Anonymous, which warns against new romantic entanglements in the first year.
“We were friends,” said Ms. Chavez, 46, who grew up in Lakewood, Colorado. “It was fun and exciting to hang out with him, but in the beginning we were just trying to build our lives.”
They went out for coffee, dinner, and more frivolous but fun activities, such as roaming around Milwaukee, where they both lived, for the “perfect milkshake,” said Ms. Chavez. They also spent a lot of time outside.
“I like to use nature as a form of a higher power,” says 40-year-old Mr. Stewart, who grew up in suburban Milwaukee.
After many months, Mr. Stewart, then a field service technician who had to travel frequently, realized during a trip to California that he missed Mrs. Chavez.
In December 2014, the couple had their first real date. They went ice skating, which turned out to be more romantic in theory than in execution.
“I think we went around the rink once and both fell almost ten times,” recalls Ms. Chavez. They soon dropped their skates and got hot chocolate instead.
Both say their bond and love could not have been deepened over the years without open communication, a strong point for the couple from the start.
“One of the crucial parts of being sober, if you really want to make it work, is to be completely honest with yourself and everyone else in your life,” Ms Chavez said. “We understand how to be honest with each other, how to talk to each other, how to solve problems together.”
Mr Stewart added: “It’s good to constantly have that partner in crime who is on the same page as you.”
He proposed the day after Christmas in 2019, while the two were on vacation in Santa Barbara, California. A month earlier, he had surreptitiously flown to Los Angeles to seek permission from Mrs. Chavez’s family.
“He’s a great planner,” Mrs. Chavez said. “He thinks very carefully about how he celebrates people.”
Months later, when the coming of the pandemic prompted them to postpone their original August 2020 wedding date, they saw it as a disappointing, but appropriate development.
“It’s very typical for things to take a long time for us,” said Ms. Chavez. “We are a slow-moving couple. It’s part of what I think has kept us so strong.”
While they were working to re-enact their marriage, the two bought a home in May 2021 in Franklin, Wisconsin, where they currently live. Ms. Chavez is now a bilingual director of community relations at Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin. Mr. Stewart works in technical sales at Cleaver-Brooks, Inc., a Milwaukee-based engineering company.
They married on July 30 at the Lake Park Summer Stage in Milwaukee. Reverend Rick Deines, a Lutheran minister and founder of the Serenity Inns, an addiction treatment center where Mr. Stewart once lived, was functioning. The venue, in the city’s Lake Park, was a spot the couple frequented for hiking, exercising, and enjoying live music.
For the reception that followed, they had organized an open-air concert for their 145 guests as a nod to the location. A close friend they had met through Alcoholics Anonymous played a two-hour set with his band.
“We’ve taken really good steps in the right direction and we’ve stayed sober the whole time,” said Mr Stewart, who has been sober with Ms Chavez for over eight years now.
“I always say it’s a miracle and it is,” said Ms. Chavez. “It’s not like our lives are perfect. But we were able to rebuild it.”