Just say "nyet!" 1950s Soviet propaganda via papusha_elena @ Flickr
I quit drinking for good three years ago. I don’t miss it. I’m not an alcoholic—although several of my family members are. I’m not pregnant. I’m not Muslim or Mormon—in fact, my religion wholeheartedly supports getting toasted on Friday nights. I quit because I didn’t like the way alcohol made me feel. Ever since I first started drinking in college, my body never took well to alcohol. Just two or three drinks were enough to give me tortured, 9th Ring of Hell hangovers. Eating a big meal first, Advil before bed, B vitamins and oceans of Gatorade, nothing truly helped. In my late twenties, the effect was only magnified, the point where one drink could leave me dry-mouthed and queasy. Apparently my family’s alcoholic gene skipped me, because by my thirtieth birthday, I had no tolerance left at all.
So I stopped. I ordered sodas and passed up open bars. That’s when the trouble actually started. I live in New York City and work in a business that revolves around cocktails. Passing up a few drinks at a working lunch—or, God forbid—ordering soda on a night out is met with outright suspicion. My polite, “no, thanks” was often met with nosy disbelief. Was I pregnant? No. On some kind of medication? No. Mind your own fucking business. I became increasingly intimidated—and irritated—by the rolled eyes and “Really?” I dreaded going to parties where I’d have to turn down liquor because I knew it would lead to another round of “You’re kidding! Seriously? Why not?”
One night, I met a colleague and two other friends for after-work drinks. I ordered a soda and some fries, and when I came back to the table, my fries awaited me…alongside a shot of bourbon. My colleague winked at me and said, “Come on…don’t make me drink alone.” Peer pressure! I was smack in the middle of a 1980s after-school special. Several months of irritation boiled over and I found myself ranting at him through clenched teeth. I didn’t want to drink! How dare he try to push it on me! He didn’t want to drink alone? Get the fuck over it! This wasn’t about him!
And that’s when it hit me. None of the peer pressure or the nosy curiosity really had anything to do with me. I had felt like people were judging me, but it turned out people felt I was judging them. In their minds, I was the snide guest who refuses dessert and looks pointedly at the host’s waistline. I discovered, when I started asking, that I’d hit a nerve without meaning to. It turned out that a lot of my friends were so laden with uncertainty or even guilt about their drinking habits that when someone—not just me—refused to drink with them they felt criticized, or shamed.
This was brought home even more starkly this past fall, when a member of my immediate family came out of her second stint in rehab for alcoholism. For a couple of years, she was absolutely flattened by booze—emotionally, physically, spiritually. The sheer, soul-sucking misery she endured was one of the most painful things I have ever witnessed. For her, not drinking is an act of intense, agonized willpower, eked out minute by minute, hour after hour, one day at a time. To be surrounded by the same intrusive questions or peer pressure that I encountered isn’t merely irritating, it threatened to upset the delicate balance of her sobriety and dump her back into the hell of alcoholism. And yet, the same holds true for her as for me: when people who don’t know her reasons question her decision not to drink, it’s almost always because they have deeper issues about their own reasons for drinking.
Not long ago, I went to a reception at a wine bar in Jerusalem, with beautiful local wines being poured left and right. I stood for a long time talking with a delightful and charming old man who was Israel’s premier wine critic and author of several books on the subject. When the waiters brought around glasses of red and white I felt guilty turning one down in front of such an expert, and began stammering about why I had ordered Pellegrino instead.
“My dear,” he said with a generous wave of his hand, “You should never have to explain to anyone why you don’t want a drink.”
And dammit, he’s right. For the record, y’all, it’s not you, it’s me. I promise. I’ll take that soda now, thanks.
I had a good friend in college who never drank. Same thing, it wasn’t religious, she didn’t have some drinking problem, she had just decided it wasn’t for her. She’d go to the bar all the time to hang out but she’d just drink diet coke, and she was totally at peace with it. No like alcohol is bad side-eye or judgment, just doing her. Everyone who was friends with her knew the situation and didn’t really care and everyone who didn’t just assumed she was drinking rum and cokes.
I don’t drink either — a friend of mine managed sobriety through AA and I stopped as a sign of solidarity and never missed it. Every now and then I run into someone who thinks it’s odd, but most people are very accepting of it.
It’s refreshing to read this post Becky, thank you.
After years of trying various answers to the question “why don’t you drink?”, I’ve found that the most effective answer is to say that I have NO reason, because literally every reason I’ve ever given otherwise has eventually been met with a counter explaining how I could/should work around it. When I say I have no reason, and stick to it (even when they say “oh come you you MUST have a reason”), they usually end up more frustrated than I do, which is better than vice-versa.
The waiter who said “you should never have to explain to anyone why you don’t want a drink” seems rare in my experience. But they are absolutely right.
Before I started drinking, I was super judgmental of people who drank (“because, *tsk* I have alcoholics in my family and, like, I have better things to do *tsk*”). And once I was drinking, I was always trying to get people to drink with me so I wouldn’t be the only one getting schnockered. Plus I couldn’t imagine /not/ wanting a drink…..because I’m an alcoholic.
And then I got sober and had to negotiate the minefield you just described, so thank you for writing this. Fortunately most of my friends today are more understanding – I’ve found it really is an age-specific thing. “Grown-ups” know that there are reasons one refuses alcohol, many younger folks still have no idea what alcoholism /means/ unless they grew up with it (and sometimes even then, they can convince themselves that “Hey, I don’t do X that my mom did, so I’m not an alcoholic”
(Sidenote, the notion of all alcoholics having a high tolerance for alcohol is kind of a myth in my experience – it sounds like you have the same allergy to alcohol that many alcoholics have, but you don’t have the mental obsession that drives an alcoholic to keep drinking to excess despite the hangovers and side effects.)
@mkp: There does seem to be a lot of evidence that alcoholism is a form of allergy or a mistake somewhere on the genome that fucks with the body’s ability to process alcohol. More than one doctor has suggested that my intolerance might actually be genetically similar to alcoholism rather than its polar opposite. And congrats for getting/staying sober. That’s a huge achievement.
@alix: Solidarity with alcoholics is another reason that I’m glad I stopped drinking, although I don’t think for a minute that my passing up a drink is the same thing as their doing it.
I have so much alcoholism on both sides of my family that I have a firm rule: I only drink socially, and only with actual, real friends. I was blessed with parents who by sheer luck acquired European drinking habits on a three-year military posting to Germany, so within my immediate family, a glass of wine with dinner was standard, but three was too much. These days, I usually have one drink – often a fancy cocktail or my standby vodka, but because I have some medication that doesn’t like drinking, I don’t often have more.
Work functions, I get tonic water and lime because I work largely with pushy undiagnosed alcoholics who are deeply anxious about conformity. I caught someone with a vodka bottle in their office once. Jesus.
@PS: I knew guys who got high at work (associates in a large conservative law firm)
@PilgrimSoul: Fortunately there’s usually a pregnant or nursing woman in the office so that someone thinks to get sparkling cider along with champagne at work celebrations… and I’ve found that “Oh, I’m on medication” is generally the only answer that shuts people up immediately (except for the really rude ones who say “For what?”)
@Becky: Thanks
2 years this month!
I really enjoyed this post. I do drink, I grew up in a family of drinkers (but crucially not alcoholics, or rather not alcoholics by Irish standards but possibly by US ones, it’s not easy to call sometimes) and I enjoy it but recently (pre second pregnancy) I found myself less interested in it.
Post my first child I definitely drink less, I also no longer do the many bad and illegal things I used to and this has meant that I lost a lot of people who I thought were friends because I am apparently ‘no longer fun’ now that I have decided to behave responsibly what with the whole having a dependent thing.
I don’t drink a huge amount – I talk about drinking wine while watching tv but really, a bottle will last me fucking forever – and some of this is probably due to the fear of alcoholism my mother instilled in me at a young age (her father was an alcoholic). But the rest of it is that 1) I’m cheap, and decent alcohol is expensive, and I can’t be arsed to go to the liquor store half the time, and 2) beer, one of the cheaper alcohols, makes me absolutely sick to my stomach. I can handle cocktails, I have never thrown up from drinking or had a hangover in my life, but cheap beer? Ugh. It’s a recipe for me feeling like I’m about to be hammered with the mother of all stomach viruses.
I must admit, in younger days I did ask a person or two “well, why on earth not?” when they turned down a drink I’d in all good faith offered them. I blame my sheltered upbringing. Drinking was rare in my family home (seriously, seriously rare) and I’ve only ever known (or known that I’ve known) one or two people with alcohol problems. Of course, once I asked and was answered, without shame or even a pause “I’m a recovering alcoholic,” I decided that unless someone is clearly endangering her/him self or others, shutting the fuck up was generally the best policy when it comes to other people’s drinking habits.
@bluebears/P.Soul: No surprise there. I always found the workplace/work engagements to be seething cauldrons of abusive drinking. My first boss was known for her 3-chardonnay lunches and her drunken passes at men during conferences. The only upside was that while she was normally a shrieking lunatic, she was generally nicer to me after the 3-chardonnay lunches, so I’m afraid I became a bit of an enabler.
Meat-eaters often treat veg*ns the same way. “I don’t eat meat” is perceived as a personal affront. Those who abstain from consuming particular foods/beverage get so much grief even when they don’t push their choices on other people.
@bluebears: See, I am such an innocent when it comes to hard drugs. In my homeland, everyone smokes pot with near impunity, but I knew precisely ONE person who did hard drugs regularly.
And now, I work in an industry of coke addicts. Except when someone tells me someone else is a coke fiend, I’m always like, “you mean the soft drink?”
Pilgrim Soul – it’s funny because where I grew up pot smoking is completely frowned on and no one does it but coke was a completely run of the mill experience.
@SarahMC: On some level, any non-conforming choice gets asked “But why not?!” because it’s threatening to group unity (egad!!). I bet 1/2 the advice columnists in the country would go out of business if everyone stopped demanding that other people explain “No, thanks.” I have food allergies and it’s gross to explain why I don’t want to eat that onion omelette or what-have-you, but I rarely get away with just a “no.”
SarahMC: I wonder if that’s why I get a lot of defensive rudeness from veg*ns. I’m an omnivore, although lately I’ve been eating mostly vegetarian to save money, but several times when I’ve mentioned animal rights/endangered species issues I care about I’ve gotten a “Why do YOU care? You eat MEAT!”
It kind of annoys the shit out of me, and I’ve blogged (incoherently) about it in the past, but I am trying to understand that particular kneejerk reaction.
Ratinski, most of the veg*ns I know don’t talk about their veg*nism at all – probably because they’re sick of explaining themselves to demanding meat-eaters.
I eat some meat but I sympathize with veg*ns and have been considering going that way for a while.
@ Pilgrim Soul “I work largely with pushy undiagnosed alcoholics who are deeply anxious about conformity.”
Lemme guess…lawyer, or investment banking? I’m a lawyer and yeah, this is how it is for me too. I’ll have one glass of wine, then I switch to diet Coke. Of course I have a perfect excuse now (nursing) but I’m not about to volunteer that to a room of middle-aged men.
My dad was an alcoholic and I used to fear it. I’ve found I just don’t enjoy alcohol and it never occurs to me to drink to cope (the way he did). I don’t think I’ve ever been drunk. Maybe tipsy, once. And I married a non-drinking Mormon (who’s now an atheist who drinks socially) – not hard to figure that one out, eh?
Sarah – can I ask something – why do the vegans have an asterisk? I’m just curious. I also have leanings towards veganism, I didn’t used to, in fact I used to be rather intolerant but then I read a fascinating piece by British author Scarlett Thomas about veganism and she won me over, although I have yet to completely take the plunge.
@emilyanne – ha, that sent me to Wikipedia too
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/veg*n
It’s just an all-encompasing way to say vegans and vegetarians at once.
Becky, we don’t like your sobriety because it means we have earn our way into your pants by being interesting, sexy and attractive. Were you a drinker the only requirement would be “nearby.”
I’ve never given anyone a hard time about not drinking, because of the millions of good reasons there are not to drink, but I have to admit in my younger days I was definitely (internally) judgmental of people who simply chose not to (and didn’t have medical/addiction issues). In my childish mind I told myself it meant they were control freaks, or people who were manipulative and would try to take advantage of other people’s drunkenness, or something. Just goes to show not to give a shit what anyone thinks of your habits, because we assholes will always think of something to judge you for.
@: Macloserboy: So that’s why we’ve never fucked! I was wondering…
I feel like, at the ripe old age of 24, I’ve finally gotten to an adult plane of thinking about alcohol (ie, not the under 21-er binge-drinking, getting drunk is cool way of thinking). For the first time this weekend, I decided NOT to go to a big drinking party (fundraiser for a charity where $30 would buy all you can drink), because I just didn’t want to be around all the surely drunk people who would be trying to get their money’s worth. I’m not sure when it started, but I no longer even want to be around drunk people. I no longer want to drink to the point where the room starts spinning. I feel no need to prove myself by the number of shots I can take.
I felt like my parents, who never drank EVER, kind of let my sister and I down in terms of teaching us what a healthy relationship with alcohol looks like, and somehow, after drinking from age 18 up til now, I’ve finally learned what that looks like. I can have a glass or two of wine at home in the evenings, but I am just SO over the whole drunk young people scene.
See, if you got drunk I’d be the funniest, sexiest, most interesting muthafucka you’d ever met. As it is I’m that strange geek who likes to hang out with women.
Ding ding ding Maritsa!
And funnyface, yeah, I missed out on the whole binge-drinking thing partially because of my parents’ training, and also because I went to school in a cosmopolitan area with a low drinking age (16) so it was never a kegger-type scene.
@P.Soul: I always wondered if the lower drinking age in Canada meant less binging/DUI/alcoholism. I did not seem to among the folks I hung out with in the TO suburbs, but I’d be curious to see if any studies were ever done.
In Ontario, the drinking age is 19, so it’s not THAT different. Only Quebec has such a low age, and in fact, in French Canadian culture children are given wine very young – I was probably served table wine from the time I was five but I did not like it very much.
There is plenty of alcoholism, don’t get me wrong. But what there isn’t so much of, often, is a kegger culture in Quebec.
@Becky/PS – I always wonder about the lower drinking age too. In theory I’m opposed to lowering it because in high school, my friends and I didn’t drink because we didn’t know anyone who was old enough to get us booze…if the drinking age had been 18, that wouldn’t have been true.
(I also think the age for military service should be 21 – can’t tell y’all how many times I’ve had “old enough to die = old enough to drink argument thrown at me)
Becky and mkp, I’m fascinated by this allergy concept, which I’ve never heard before. I have to enforce a strict limit on myself because I have a very low tolerance. One gets me happily buzzed, two makes me drunk, three guarantees a horrific all day hangover after. I’ll go to parties and try to sip the same drink for as long as possible so no one hands me another. I still imbibe, because I enjoy the taste and certain food pairings, but I’ve wondered if I was the only one who dealt with this.
funnyface, my parents never ever drank and it was really looked down on at home. In their culture it’s seen as a pastime for homeless people and folks with personal problems. Basically, drinker=alcoholic was their working assumption.
I’ve since brought my mom around to understanding the concept of normal people enjoying wine with dinner and she doesn’t bat an eyelash now when she comes to my house and my siblings and I have wine or cocktails. I feel you on the difficulty of getting to the point of having an adult relationship with alcohol. I didn’t have any kind of responsible model for drinking and I went through a lot of craziness from about age 14-18.
From my point of view I do think 18 is a sensible age, I think the leaving it til 21 tends towards binge drinking and treating it as something more special than it is. That said I am purely basing this on the fact that the people I knew who couldn’t drink until 21 tended to have a less mature attitude towards alcohol because it had been ‘forbidden’.
Anything that has a minimum age limit (or height limit or what-have-you) will always be forbidden and certain personality types will want to over indulge when they’re finally free to (I spent many nights my freshman year staying up until 2 am…because I COULD)…plus most college kids can find liquor before 21 if they want to. I think it’s important not to be experimenting at 15 if it can be delayed to 18.
@Hanamuru – here’s what the Mayo clinic has to say about alcohol allergies/intolerance: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/alcohol-allergy/AN00818
I think most doctors by now would agree alcoholism usually has a physical and an emotional component (though both are not always present in every alcoholic) that can lead to dependency/abuse. It must have been so hard to get sober back in the days when everyone just thought alcoholism was weakness of character, and alcoholics were just past help after a certain point.
@funnyface: “I felt like my parents, who never drank EVER, kind of let my sister and I down in terms of teaching us what a healthy relationship with alcohol looks like, and somehow, after drinking from age 18 up til now, I’ve finally learned what that looks like. I can have a glass or two of wine at home in the evenings, but I am just SO over the whole drunk young people scene.”
Are you me? This was me in my early 20s. Came to college, saw everyone else drinking, figured it must be fun, so I kept trying it every few months. Finally realized that I never had an experience that was substantially improved by drinking — in fact, I had many experiences that were seriously worsened by alcohol.
Now I drink every once in awhile, usually just a beer or two in social settings. I accidentally got tipsy at a holiday party — no dinner beforehand, bad! — and felt awful about it. Ugh, I just hate drinking.
@Kivrin/funnyface
The trouble is, it can be hard to show kids what “normal” drinking looks like. I don’t feel that I know what it looks like because even when I watch other people drinking “normally” I’m obsessing over what’s in their glass and whether they’re going to have another one.
Someday when I have kids they’re going to get a heckuva an education about what problem drinking looks like (Um, I’ll tell them, not demonstrate) and they’ll have to figure out for themselves whether they want to risk genetic/personality predispositions and try drinking out for themselves. (Right now I’m practicing on my 16-year-old brother)
The talk about “good reasons” for not drinking is also bothersome. Why should someone need an (arbitrarily) “good” reason not to drink alcohol?
I am in a very alchohol soaked period of my life, and I’m generally LOVING life right now. I just happen to be partying a lot. So I hang out with people who are in the same headspace and I know some of the hanging out/partying I’ve done recently would make a non-drinker feel very awkward and excluded, which is why I would not invite non-drinkers to said activities unless I know they’re actually cool with being around it.
I don’t have alcoholism in my family and don’t have an addictive personality, but I completely understand that different people are, uh, different and process drinking differently.
@exelizabeth; “I know some of the hanging out/partying I’ve done recently would make a non-drinker feel very awkward and excluded.”
If you’re doing something drunk that you wouldn’t do sober, or that wouldn’t make sense/seem enjoyable to a person who’s not drunk…why are you doing it? It sounds like you love drinking because it makes your experiences/personality different than when you’re not drinking.
My dad is allergic–or something–to all alcohol (came on slowly in adulthood, but now all booze induces massive, 2-day migraines, even half a glass). My mom falls asleep immediately after one glass of wine. Thus, we did not have booze in the house growing up.
I didn’t drink until senior year in college because of my dad’s adverse reactions and my mom’s family history of alcoholism, and damn, those first 3 years made certain parties hell. I got in the habit of holding a coke just so people would leave me alone because they assumed I had rum. I think they thought that I was judging them (and sometimes I was because, let’s face it, there is a subset of college drunkenness that is obnoxious as hell–but not always).
As it is, a single beer makes me vomit uncontrollably. Apparently, hops and I are not friends. This means that I generally have to pay more for booze, and I have one or maybe two on special occasions and hold it for a really loooong time. I’m curious to see whether I’ll end up like my dad. Right now, I have a low tolerance and am a cheap date.
I am the fucking rock star of designated driving though, along with my former alcoholic buddy. Seriously, the downside to NYC is that you cannot use that excuse. It’s really quite functional, and it also means that we leave when *I* want to leave.
I don’t drink either. I drank kind of a lot my first couple years of college, but I stopped after my sophomore year. I’m still an undergrad, so I get judged pretty harshly for not drinking; I feel like the only 21 year old on the planet who doesn’t feel like binging on the weekends. And it’s not only that I don’t like it. I can’t (without some really severe pukey action and total blackout) because of all the psych meds I take. It’s really no one’s business that I’m crazy though, so I really hate having to explain WHY I don’t like the way alcohol makes me feel.
And for everyone who’s mentioned the veg thing, it’s true. I was a vegetarian for about 9 years, and a lot of people got almost offended when I declined food with meat. I guess it’s just that it seems judge-y to not eat something everyone else is eating, but it’s also pretty embarrassing to have your beliefs attacked. People get more uptight about food than almost anything else. Why must your food and drink choices say something about your morals?
Add me to your list of non-drinkers. Have never been drunk in all my life. Have sipped some wine here and there but it probably all added up to not even a bottle total since I’ve been of aged 17 years ago. My laugher is loud and contagious and I am a klutz so to some I at times could pass as being a bit intoxicated.
Funny I do not get questioned on why I do not drink.
I haven’t drunk for over 10 years, and when people ask, I tell them “nothing moral, just medical reasons.” That usually works. If someone asks for more information, I give it to them (colon surgery), and then they regret asking.
My wife, OTOH, is an alcoholic, and it is extremely frustrating. I hope that it keeps the children, now teens, from drinking irresponsibly, since they’ve never been taught responsible drinking.
@excelizabeth writes:
“which is why I would not invite non-drinkers to said activities unless I know they’re actually cool with being around it.”
knowing that someone ELSE is cool with what you’re doing is extremely suggestive. It sounds more like you’re uncomfortable with them not drinking than you are worried about their comfort.
Sorry, I meant to write “subjective”, not “suggestive” above. Apologies.
@HanaMaru: Your description is exactly how I felt about alcohol in my 20s, right down to the nursing one drink for an entire party. But my tolerance got much worse as I got older–that may happen to you too. I still miss certain drink/food pairings, but it’s not worth the headache/queasiness I get after the fact.
Not drinking alcohol was what made me realize that I was being a jerk to veg*ns. I think in both cases both groups tend to feel more judged than they actually are due to a small number of genuine assholes, and get defensive about it, like I felt that veg*ns were judging me as some kind of animal killer, when I’ve known I think two who really were and a whole lot more who just want to do their eating in peace. And I definitely feel judged as a prude or a killjoy by people who drink, but I think that’s probably mainly overreacting to the few jerks I’ve encountered as well. I do get frustrated by a couple of friends I have who know I don’t drink, yet insist on offering every time and then lamenting that I’m missing out. They don’t spend tons of time on it, but we’ve been friends for years. They know this about me.
I do avoid places that are full of drunk people, though. I mean, most of my friends drink and I don’t mind hanging out with people who are drinking even if I’m the only one not doing it, but once it gets into the territory where I’m the only one sober, that’s just not fun anymore. Most of my friends have a drink or two pretty frequently but rarely get drunk, which is fine by me.
Hey BeckySharper, what you said in your fifth paragraph from the bottom is so true – that when drinkers freak out about people who don’t drink, it has nothing to do with the non-drinker and everything to do with the drinker’s insecurity about their own habits.
Also, about your family member – my husband is a recovering alcoholic. He’s been sober for eight years. He said the first couple of years were the hardest, and that he went to AA almost on a daily basis. However, he’s gotten to place where he doesn’t need to white-knuckle it to get through the day, and in fact he can watch me drink a glass of wine and as far as I know it has no effect on him. I think the best thing you can do is let your family member know you love and support her, and remind her that it will get easier over time. I’m sure having you as a non-drinking role model will help as well, because one thing my husband told me is that he had to learn how to enjoy life without a drink in his hand, which can be hard in our culture. So having you around may help with that a bit.
@whynotshesaid: Thanks. I really do hope that she reaches the point that sobriety comes easily and the desire for a drink goes away. Daily AA meetings seem to be helping a lot and she has a good sponsor. Good luck to your husband! He’s achieved what I think most recovering alcoholics aspire to.
This topic always fascinates me because I am an alcoholic. Typically when I go out to dinner, I ask for the wine glass to be removed from the table, especially if others are drinking. If anyone asks, I tell them I’m an alcoholic. But lots of times no one asks, even when I can tell they would prefer if I’d say yes to getting a beer or something. But to be honest, I’m not all that concerned with their discomfort. Like you wrote above, it is more about their anxiety about theirvdrinking behavior than it is about how peculiar I am.
Frankly, I’m not at all embarrassed saying I’m a sober alcoholic and demystifying the whole thing.