I spent most of my thirties dating. That is probably the simplest way to describe it. I had a steady job, a small apartment, and a circle of friends. On the surface things looked pretty normal. The one part of my life that kept changing was the relationships.
The pattern was almost always the same. I would meet someone through friends or online. The first few months would feel easy. We would go out to dinner, meet each other’s friends, and talk about future plans. After a while something would start to shift.
Most of my dates involved drinks. That was just how people in my social circle spent time together. Happy hour after work, cocktails before dinner, wine on the weekends. I never thought much about it because everyone around me was doing the same thing.
Over time I started to notice that alcohol had a way of changing the tone of the conversations I had with the people I was dating. After a couple of drinks I was quicker to speak my mind. Sometimes that meant saying things that were more blunt than I intended.
A few of the relationships ended after arguments that happened late at night after we had both been drinking. The next morning the details were usually fuzzy but the damage had already been done.
When those relationships ended I tended to focus on what the other person had done wrong. Maybe they had been too sensitive or they had overreacted to something I said. It was easier to see their part than my own.
One of my close friends started pointing out a pattern. She had known me long enough to see several of these relationships from the beginning to the end. One evening we were talking about another breakup and she asked me a simple question.
She asked how often alcohol had been part of the arguments I described.
I had to think about it for a minute. When I replayed those nights in my head I realized that drinking had been involved in almost every one of them. Not always in huge amounts, but enough to lower the filter between what I thought and what I said.
That realization made me uncomfortable. I had always thought of myself as someone who handled alcohol pretty well. I was not missing work or getting into serious trouble. From the outside my life looked stable.
Still, the question kept coming back to me. If alcohol was present during most of the arguments that ended my relationships, maybe it deserved a closer look.
I started experimenting with going out on dates without drinking. At first it felt strange. Sitting across from someone with a glass of water while they ordered a cocktail made me feel a little out of place. I worried that it would make the conversation awkward.
What actually happened was the opposite. Without alcohol in the mix the conversations moved at a slower pace. I listened more carefully and thought longer before responding. I also noticed that I had a better sense of how the other person was reacting to what I said.
Around that same time I started attending a local discussion group about alcohol use. I was not sure if I really belonged there but I wanted to hear how other people thought about their habits. The stories I heard were all different, but the common thread was that many people had not realized how much alcohol was influencing their behavior until they stepped back from it.
Looking back now I can see that the relationships themselves were not the only issue. The bigger issue was how I showed up in those relationships. Drinking had a way of speeding things up and pushing conversations into territory that might have unfolded more calmly without it.
I am not someone who believes that every drink automatically leads to trouble. Plenty of people can have a glass of wine and leave it at that. For me the question became whether alcohol was helping or hurting the parts of my life that mattered most.
Right now I am spending less time worrying about finding the next relationship and more time paying attention to how I feel day to day. Some evenings I still go out with friends, but more often we meet for coffee or take a walk.
If another relationship comes along it will probably grow out of those kinds of moments. Conversations that happen without the extra noise that alcohol used to add.
For a long time I thought the problem was that I kept choosing the wrong people. It took me a while to see that the bigger change needed to happen with me.