My spouse is sober... I'm not

And why, despite everything I know, I haven't given up drinking

“There is so much here for smart, creative women from this smart, creative woman, plus I have only just discovered Lindsay reading extracts from her powerful memoir – I am already hooked (and now a complete fan of her work).”

anna wharton

, Sunday Times bestseller, The Orwell Prize longlisted writer and writer of The Spectator’s Book of the Year 2023

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My spouse is sober… I’m not

And why, despite everything I know, I haven’t given up drinking

Shetland weddings are the worst. Well, they’re the best but they’re also the worst.

Let me explain…

In August 2022, one of my husband’s many cousins was getting married after a number of COVID-enforced delays. We would, therefore, be making the trip in full anticipation of much-needed Good Times.

There would be a beach ceremony followed by an evening in the Town Hall in Lerwick followed by the Second Day back at the beach. On that day, the sun would break miraculously though the clouds, the fire would roar, rounders would be played and the delicious seafood buffet from the night before would be brought back out of the cold to be finished off with a seasoning of sand, this time.

Meal Beach, Burra, Shetland. August 2022

On top of the formal celebrations, across our ten day visit there would be many a barbeque and lots of fizzy wine. Tins of beer and gins and tonic. More fizzy wine…

It would be boozy; of course it would. Holidays were like that. Especially ones with added nuptials.

And yet, however similar that holiday was to many others that came before it, it would also act as a watershed moment for our family. The night of the wedding would be the first time my daughters would cry at the sight of a drunk parent.

It had to be the last.

How had we arrived here, I wondered, lying awake in our rental cottage late that night beside a snoring, comatose spouse. He may have been the one to make them upset, but I had to admit my relationship with alcohol had become far from healthy, too.

How had I arrived here?

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I grew up with a fear of alcohol. Living with an alcoholic father does this to you. You know what it is to live with the constant threat of drunkenness. You are hyper-vigilant. Safety-seeking. Even my formative experiences around drink felt scary. I was compelled to look after my friends and struggled to lose myself in the fun of experimentation. Though I did eventually drink socially in my teens I was always the one switching to water after a time, much to my friends’ embarrassment.

Who’s going to serve (underage) you when you’re also asking for fucking water?

I was lucky, in a way. I had a fully-functioning off-switch and after a couple, the drink tasted different. It became sour in my mouth; made my jaw clench. I’d duck out of nights out, known for having a spare pair of flat shoes in my bag. Yes, I know. I may not have been the drunkest one, but I put myself in danger thinking it was safe enough to run home alone in the middle of the night…

I digress.

The social drinking of my teens and early twenties morphed as my pay packet grew, yet I never would have described my relationship with alcohol as problematic. In fact, I prided myself in having dodged that particular bullet (thinking I’d also dodged the one that predisposes the children of bipolar parents to mental health problems of their own).

A tongue-in-cheek (or bottle-in-mouth) piss-take of a photo taken on a staff night out in 2009. Buckfast, if you don’t know, is Scotland’s other national drink. It’s bogging, as we say.

In the mid 2000s I set up home with the man I’d later marry and became intoxicated by the trappings of cohabitation. A drinks trolley I’d seen in Living Etc magazine took on a particular allure and we repurposed a vintage crockery cabinet to serve as ours. We stocked it with spirits, cocktail-making paraphernalia, rare bitters and cute Babycham glasses. Simultaneously, I started jotting down

Fiona Beckett

‘s wine recommendations from the Guardian food supplement, deciding which ones we’d stockpile and which we’d savour because this is what middle-class professional couples did.

My drinking wasn’t anything like my dad’s had been. I knew what I was doing.

My parents at a dinner-dance in 1985

A wedding and a house move later, we entered the baby and toddler years. You know how this goes: I don’t have to tell you about wine o’clock. Perhaps you’ve reached for that crisp, cold bottle in the fridge, or at the very least seen the insidious merch in the shops. Maybe you, too, bonded over glasses of fizz with women who had children the same age as yours, giddy at the prospect that maybe you could be friends?

Perhaps you breastfed your baby and told yourself alcohol didn’t make its way through to the breastmilk? Maybe you were hungover and stuck your kids in front of the telly while you dozed on the sofa beside them, only dimly aware of what they were up to?

Then, in 2019, my father-in-law died suddenly. Then COVID hit. Then my own dad died suddenly, too.

Wine and/or a pre-dinner cocktail became a daily feature, but I consoled myself that drink would eventually play less of a role in our lives. I’d remind myself as I perused the wine aisles in search of bottles with a lowish ABV that I was being sensible, because I could drink a whole bottle of that stuff, be able to have a decent sleep and have less of a chance that the dreaded hangxiety would hit. I’d tell myself again as an impatient child hauled at my sleeve in the booze aisle that I was a ‘normal’ drinker. That I was in possession of a reliable off-switch.

But it had started going on the blink.

Events meant that my husband’s, meanwhile, appeared to have broken completely.

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Writing this, I’m catching myself. Wondering just how honest to be. What snapshots like this imply. It’s hard to write, and even if there were plenty of sober times, this is the truth of it.

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How did we get here?

Well, there was all the tragedy. But perhaps it was also because alcohol had been completely normalised in our household? There was always a bottle of wine in the fridge door. Always a case of beer in the porch. When we redecorated the TV room, we designed a special lit-up cubby hole for the whiskys.

They’re still there; a clutch of dusty illuminated ornaments, now.

For my husband, something clicked after that wedding. It was about the children but it was also about him. How much he valued himself and wanted to be well. Fit, healthy and strong. When he learned that any good he was doing to his body with diet and exercise was undone by alcohol, it gave him pause.

His initial plan was to try for a year. That way, he’d experience all the major life celebrations – birthdays, Christmas, holidays, weddings – as a sober person. It felt like a challenge he was ready to meet. A year passed, and he decided he wasn’t going back. The impact on his mental and physical health had been profound. Why would he drink again?

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But me? I’m still drinking. Why?

I did join him for a couple of months, but didn’t remain a non-drinker. I decided then a couple of months off would be enough, though even before his sobriety, I had gotten curious and read

Holly Whitaker

‘s book, Quit Like a Woman: The Radical Choice Not to Drink in a Culture Obsessed with Alcohol. At the time, I couldn’t quite believe what I was reading. I remember telling him one night that all forms of alcohol (yes, even red wine) are basically just ethanol and poison to the body in myriad ways. He hadn’t been ready to hear that, then.

Neither had I.

But perhaps it planted a seed. Allowed space and time for an idea to ferment, unconsciously, before what then looked from the outside to be a sudden decision to stop drinking completely.

Since he became a non-drinker, I’ve done the Zoe programme and learned a lot about alcohol’s impact on the body. It’s sobering stuff. Particularly the new research detailed in Professor David Nutt’s book, Drink? The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health.

Rosamund Dean

has done a great deal around this in relation to the mechanisms by which alcohol causes cancer, and

Madeleine Dore

,

Annie Ridout

and

Clover Stroud

have become trusted voices while I consider alcohol’s place in my future. I’ve even dabbled in non-alcoholic yet GABA-wave influencing ‘spirits’ in an attempt to get the delicious, fuzzy feeling I so love when I’m one glass of wine down.

Because I do love it. I love the taste of wine, especially, and I love how one glass makes me feel.

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And what of my marriage when at one time, I couldn’t imagine not being able to share a drink together?

We were both sober on our wedding day 13 years ago; no time to drink when you are your own wedding band

On the plus side, I no longer have to worry about him on nights out. On the negative side, we don’t socialise as much together. He’s happier at home and when he does come out, it’s obvious to us both that something has changed. He wants to leave as soon as the gig or the film or the meal is over, while I might want to linger on. He’s facing up to the fact that drinking allowed him to mask some uncomfortable truths about his feelings of self-worth and his discomfort in some social situations, too.

So where does this leave me? Who knows. Maybe with yet more thinking and living to do? I’m not writing this today holding any sort of definitive position on alcohol, for myself or for anyone else. But I do question whether, in possession of all the facts, I can drink in a carefree way any more.

Maybe I won’t ever swear off it completely, but I will keep questioning myself when feel I’d like a drink. Why? Is it just because I’m making dinner on a Saturday evening, the radio tuned to 6 Music? Might a kombucha do? And if I have one of the single-serve cans of organic red wine I sometimes buy, can I stop at one?

I have Professor Nutt’s voice in my head now when I drink: ‘Drink the least amount you can to get the effect you want.’ That seems fair.

So long as we know what it is that we want.

And we stop when we have it.

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Where are you at with alcohol? I'd love to know, if you fancy meeting me in the comments?

And if you don't want to comment, that's totally fine. Hit the heart or restack so that others in your network can find these words.

Lindsay x