The sad link between his male friendships and drinking.
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If you are in a relationship and you like to go out drinking, you probably have one friend that your wife or girlfriend doesn’t want you to go out with.
I am that friend.
It always starts innocently enough, you meet me for an after work drink, or maybe you talked her into letting you go out with me on the weekend. It has been a while, after all, since you have had a night out, and you and I are friends. We need to catch up and hang out for a bit. The last one didn’t go well. She was mad at you for a week it’s true, but you have been a good, you haven’t been out for months, and this time will go differently than the last.
It always starts innocently enough. We need to catch up and hang out for a bit. We are cracking each other up and I am buying. Have one more.
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You and I are just going to be out for a couple, and you will be home by 7, or 8 at the latest. But of course once the drink flows we start having a good time.
We are cracking each other up and I am buying. Have one more.
Have one on me. There are some good looking women here, and the bartender is pouring us strong drinks. We tip well, and since he knows me, I come here all the time, he gives us a round on the house.
We are doing the thing that men do, carousing, drinking, and telling jokes. We wont go too far though. You aren’t going to drive, you are going to take a cab, and you’re just flirting with that woman next to you at the bar, you aren’t actually going to cheat.
At 8 you text your wife and say you are going to be late. You do the same at ten. You try to call around 11 because you haven’t heard back, but apparently she shut off her phone.
You make it home. You know this because you woke up the next day and you are in your bed, and this time you didn’t get arrested, and you didn’t cheat on your wife. If you could remember your behavior last night you would never step outside your house again, but sadly you can’t even quite recall how you got home at all. You look outside and are happy your car isn’t in the driveway, at least that means you didn’t drive.
She is mad at you. You worried her, you were mean to her when you got home. You were so, so drunk. You try and shake off your hangover like so much dust, but it hangs on with fury and wreaks its vengeance on your day, your life.
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Drinking and male friendship have always gone hand in hand for me. Pretty much every close male friendship I have ever had has been based around drinking. When I want to spend time with one of my friends, we don’t go for a run, and we don’t go out for breakfast. We go out drinking. And we don’t just drink a little, we drink a lot.
I have long had a complicated relationship with booze. I know that it is extremely bad for me. Once I start, I don’t stop. One drink becomes three, then three becomes seven then seven turns into more. I get cocky, I act like an asshole, my moral code, which was loose to begin with, ceases to exist entirely. I have been in fights, I mess with peoples heads, I have been arrested for OUI, I have gone home with women I don’t know and crawled out of bed at 3 in the morning and gone home to my girlfriend.
At some point, my relationship with booze transformed into something complicated and dark. What once was exciting had turned into something destructive and sad.
Although I fooled myself for quite a while, I wasn’t cool when I was out drinking. I wasn’t fun. I was out of control and the people in my life were suffering because of it.
It became time to for me to break up with binge drinking, and with that it was time to break up with some of my friends too.
I have had these breakups before, but I was always on the receiving end. I have a friend that I used to hang out with a lot. He was my age, was funny as Hell, and we were going through some of the same stuff in our lives. We both were glib and charming, we both liked to party, and neither one of us had anyone else in our life that would pretend that we weren’t screwed up.
So it began. Night after night we would hit the bars and drink. It started off fun of course, but as time went on it became apparent that my friend was even more messed up than I was. He started missing work because of drinking, and when we went out he started doing coke and putting himself in some rather terrifying situations.
So he stopped. I was happy for him, I really was. But when he stopped our friendship did too. He got into surfing, and began hiking a lot. I found someone new to drink with.
I like him. I kind of even love him, but the whole of who we were as friends was based around booze and debauchery.
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For a long time we texted each other and said we were going to get together. I would say lunch, he would say lets go for a hike, but we never did hang out, not even once.
He, like so many other people in my life over the years, left that life, and with it, left what seemed to be a close friendship with me. I like him. I kind of even love him, but the whole of who we were as friends was based around booze and debauchery.
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I have this one friend I haven’t seen for a while. He is a day drinker, which for me is the most dangerous time to start boozing. I don’t have three or four and then go home, I can’t comprehend how that could even happen.
He and I spent a lot of time together over the last few years, drinking, cracking each other up, honing our relationships with bartenders and drinking some more. He is married, and he has two young kids. At night he would go home to them, while I would find someone else to meet me out and continue on. He would pretend to his wife he hadn’t been drinking all day while she would pretend she couldn’t tell.
I had to stop. I had to. It just wasn’t fun anymore. The thought of didn’t even sound fun. Drinking all day sounded painful, irresponsible, and dangerous. When I thought about I realized I never really liked it even back then. It wasn’t even that I liked being drunk, it was just that I was drunk, and once that happened it was all over.
We did the dance for a while, texted back and forth, said maybe next week, or a couple weeks from now, but it never happened. When the day would come I would back out, I would run from it.
One day a few weeks ago he emailed me and asked if I was mad at him, if he pissed me off. And that is just it. He didn’t. He is awesome, and if I could figure out a way that we could hang out, that we could be friends without getting incredibly drunk together I would do so in a minute.
But I can’t.
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Photo Credit: Flickr Creative Commons/theopie
A well written and enjoyable article for the keen observations on how we analyze the; why alcohol doesn’t work question. For me, it finally came down to the simple fact that it wasn’t my buddies or anything else, it was alcohol and the effect it produced when combined with my particular personality. I recognize all the pain and disappointment the article hints at, I have felt how my actions impacted others but, those feelings came much later, after the alcohol was put away. Even then, it took some years to appreciate it all. I harken back to the comment from… Read more »
Men must find a way to enjoy their companionship without having to resorting to drinking. I also have listen to people who were promise fast track promotion by their bosses if they became drinking buddies with them. Sometimes, I wonder people who became alcoholics were then discarded by their drinking buddies because they serve their purpose and then their friends look for a new drinking buddy who was not yet a chronic alcoholic. The military and law enforcement are notorious for having alcohol as part of their celebrations and using it to help build cohesion and morale plus looking down… Read more »