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Lindsay Hubbard and Carl Radke Open Up About Going to Couples Therapy
The couple got candid about Lindsay’s decision to continue drinking amid Carl’s sobriety at the Summer House Season 7 reunion.
Carl Radke made a commitment to live a sober lifestyle shortly before Summer House Season 5 premiered back in early 2021, and more recently, he celebrated two years of sobriety this past January. His now-fiancée, Lindsay Hubbard, also abstained from drinking alcohol for a period of about five months, starting at the end of 2021, because as she said on the Season 7 premiere, Carl was “struggling with his own sobriety around the holidays” and she wanted “to support him.”
The following spring, though, Lindsay made a change. As she put it, “Now I drink again, but I don’t black out. That’s as best as I can explain it.”
Fast-forward to Part 1 of the Summer House Season 7 reunion, where host Andy Cohen asked Carl and Lindsay a viewer-submitted question that read, in part, “A couple of times it really did feel like you weren’t doing what you wanted to do because you didn’t want to upset Carl. Do you ever feel like you’re walking on eggshells around him?”
Lindsay responded, “Sometimes, just because I want to be respectful in a sense where it’s like I don’t want to drink too much rosé and get activated, and you know, something comes up or I feel defensive, and then he’s like, ‘How can I even help you when you are indefensible?’”
Carl also chimed in, explaining that while he wants Lindsay “to be her best version of herself and have a good time,” it can be “hard” for him when she gets to a certain “level.”
“I try to talk to her about that, so she can recognize and learn and grow from it,” Carl added. “I think she’s done a lot of work from Season 4’s ‘Don’t activate me’ Lindsay to now.”
Andy then asked Kyle Cooke for his opinion on the matter, pointing out that Carl previously told him that he was hesitant to be with Lindsay if she was going to start drinking again.
Kyle noted that Carl made that comment “very early on in their relationship,” but at the same time, he had concerns of his own.
“I think they had been dating a month or two. [But] it was the first time that I saw that that was gonna be the number one challenge. I knew how fragile his sobriety was,” Kyle explained. “When they started dating, he hadn’t quite made it to his one-year mark and he was very adamant that prior summer about getting to that one-year mark as a single person, identifying who he is sober. And so I was pretty torn.”
In response, Carl and Lindsay didn’t deny that her drinking had the potential to cause problems. Instead, they shared that they’re being proactive about it by going to couples therapy.
“It’s become a major part of the dialogue because, listen, I never wanted to hold her back from being herself,” Carl explained. “But sometimes when there’s alcohol involved, we don’t communicate well whatsoever. It can snowball, but we work on it. We do therapy. I’m committed to trying to figure it out.”
Carl also commended Lindsay for her commitment after she shared that she attends Al-Anon meetings.
“What she’s had to sign up for in being in a relationship with me, the baggage that I have, is a lot,” he told the group. “I am an alcoholic and a drug addict — fact. I’ve had a major problem, but I knew I had a foundation and a friend that was willing to work with me on it, so communication’s always constant. But I have to give her a lot of grace and a lot of credit for what she’s had to sign up for.”
