Have you noticed that your friends are a little less fun? That everyone leaves a dinner party earlier? That their stories are less wild or funny or revealing? This may be because so many people have decided to cut down on their drinking after a spate of ominous articles on how alcohol, even in moderate amounts, increases your risk for cancer and other serious health problems.
After years of pushing the benign myth that a glass of wine a day is good for the heart, it seems the medical establishment has abandoned hedonists and pleasure seekers. Is there a safe amount of alcohol? It turns out no.
For this and other more amorphous reasons, I have noticed increasing numbers of people around me are sober-ish. They drink only socially or only two glasses of wine a week or only in restaurants. They are not willing to give up drinking entirely, which feels like too vast and depressing a surrender of life’s pleasures. So they make rules for themselves.
Someone I know has a new ritual of drinking a nonalcoholic beer with nuts on her terrace. Another friend told me that she used to drop by for drinks at friends’ houses in the evenings, and now it is just as often tea.
One obvious problem with this new responsible, upstanding mode of socializing is that it shortens parties. When people are drinking, time blurs and the evening spools out pleasantly. No one thinks about a meeting the next day or getting the kids off to school. But when they are having maybe one glass of wine, the evening ends promptly. There is no lingering, no new bottle opened, no children awoken by noisy guests, no wine bottles left on the table by tipsy hosts. This may be the end of long boozy nights.
The sober-ish life also leads to peculiar new etiquette frontiers. One friend of mine observed, “When you go out to dinner with someone now and the waiter comes to take the drink order and they say, ‘just water for me,’ you know that person is saving their glass of wine for a better dinner. They are not committing to the evening. You’re not worth a drink.”
For many this health news coincides with other more ineffable feelings that drinking isn’t as much fun as it used to be. That ebullience we remember from the old days is harder to come by or concoct. Is this sad? Is it actually fine and maybe even nice? Those brisk weekend mornings when you get up early and work or take the dogs on a walk through the red gold leaves with your head clear? They are not so bad.
There are certain people I see only over real alcoholic drinks, because of stressful undercurrents, because they themselves are big drinkers, or people for whom the ritual of a cocktail matters, people who like to be festive in an old-school way. They are people I find myself seeing less.
I had a boyfriend in my 20s who didn’t drink. He didn’t want his mind to be clouded the next day. He drank grapefruit juice or sparkling water. At the time this irked me. It felt annoying that his body was a temple, and that he never really gave up control (not because he once had a problem with drinking, which I would have understood, but just because he was preternaturally responsible). Now, in occasional flashes, I can see the appeal of this spartan, healthy life .
The newly sober-ish have aging parents, have sat by hospital beds, have felt the slow approach of death. They have been up late worrying that they or someone they love is sick or declining. So it is not as easy to block out medical warnings as it once was. The desire to feel clear and healthy is stronger.
I can’t help admiring my friends and family who are still excessive and careless, who still go for the third martini. I remember reading about Mary McCarthy , one of the writers I most admire, traipsing around the West Village in the 1940s. The night she met one of her husbands she drank three daiquiris before she saw him, two Manhattans with him and a bit of red wine at dinner. There was a lot of mayhem and disorder back then. I think of a line from a John Berryman poem that sums it up: “Somebody slapped/ Somebody’s second wife somewhere.”
I recently threw a party for 50 of my graduate students and former students at my house and noticed that they are mostly not sober-ish. They sometimes run off with each other’s coats or shoes. They smoke on the deck and leave cigarette butts in plants and go out to a bar afterward.
After half a glass of wine, I couldn’t help noticing that I had better, more substantive conversations with more of them than I recall having at past parties when I might have had more to drink. I talked to everyone I wanted to talk to. I made sure that everyone mixed. To my surprise, as I was blowing out candles and throwing away plastic cups, I realized that I probably had more fun than I would have had on a tipsier night.
I guess another piece of good news about the sober-ish life is that you do really savor and appreciate your glass of wine, in those rare glimmering moments it appears. A sip or two is a party.
