Tainted Love
I'm still drinking, most often alone. Why?
Hi friends,
This time last year, I published a post that would free-pour its way from my laptop in Glasgow onto screens across the globe.
I wrote that I was still drinking long after my spouse’s relationship with booze had come to an end. I explored how his sobriety had changed our relationship and forced me to reckon with the realisation that — the daughter of an addict — I’d been kidding myself I was somehow immune to developing an alcohol dependency.
I didn’t schedule the post imagining it would provoke a big response, possibly because I’d never had a “viral” moment in my life, yet woke that Sunday morning to a slew of comments marking the start of what would be a solid week in the comments thread.
It was overwhelming, but I was immensely grateful for the honesty in the stories folk shared and — following this week’s restack and LOADS of replies to questions I asked on IG Stories about (peri) folks’ drinking habits — continue to share. These range from the desperate, the shocking and the sad to the more optimistic and I urge you, even if you read the piece last year, to head back over and check them out.
Last February, I couldn’t help but feel I was ill-equipped to offer much more than a space for folk to share their experiences, fears, wins. I certainly had zero advice. I wasn’t on the other side of anything and, as it happens, I’m still not. Over the past year, I’ve continued to grapple with the reasons why I still drink. True, I’ve gone sometimes a fortnight or so without it, but I’ll temper this by telling you I drank every single day of our summer van trip. That added up to nearly seven weeks of mostly “just” one beer or one glass of wine, which was my justification (that plus holiday), even though I suspected it was making my vasomotor1 symptoms of perimenopause worse. Reflecting on that time now, my anxiety also peaked on that trip and I upped my SSRI rather than reduced my drinking to manage it.
Back home, I’m having far less and have managed big gatherings and parties either completely sober or by making myself stop at two no matter how compelling the voice in my head urging a third is. However, there’s one kind of social situation that presents a particular challenge: the one-on-one. It’s not the other person’s fault, but there’s no denying that the part of me still wanting to remain palatable is alive and well. The part of me, too, that in that situation wants to get a bit drunk. Wants the feeling of intimacy that it facilitates. These are the times when I drink more than I want to, knowing it’s happening but also that I can’t and don’t want to stop.
Those nights are becoming less and less frequent, which is sad because it means I’m avoiding certain people. It also means that the majority of the drinking I do is the kind we’ve been long told is the worst way to drink: at home, alone. The kind of drinking our grandparents would never have done. The kind my mum didn’t do, but my dad did and for which he was vilified. I don’t think so much now about the story she used to tell me but for a long time, I did. I was nine or ten when she issued her final ultimatum in still life form comprising a school photo of me and my brother, a bottle of whisky and a glass. She was forcing him to choose and he chose the drink. She’d revisit this story in my teens and twenties when he’d let me down again, reminding me he’d never been able to put me first.
When my own drinking became problematic through COVID, I used to console myself with a very different mental image. It featured a specific friend who, in my mind’s eye, was drinking in the way I was about to, which was nothing like my dad. This made it alright. They, too, were in their kitchen at teatime with 6 Music on the radio, stirring a risotto or something. They, too, were reaching for the crisp bottle of organic, fairtrade white wine in the fridge door and pouring a glass. Sipping it while they stirred and going back for a cheeky top up no one else in the house would know about. I’d pour my own large glass. Drink it quickly on an empty stomach. Go back for more.
Even though times have changed and I’m not one of the worrying number of UK adults still drinking more than they did pre-COVID2, in writing this, I notice my appetite is whetted. I’m thinking about whether nipping to the shop to buy some before I collect my daughter from the bus will make me late for her, and if I can get out of doing the gymnastics run. I’m picturing teatime and children in another room. Me, starting dinner and pouring wine into a glass, wanting the burn in my throat. The swift heat of it on an empty stomach. The eventual fuzz of something approaching possibility. I won’t buy a bottle; just one large glass in a single can. There would be nothing wrong with that, would there?
Or is this just a watered-down version of what I was once more often than not like of an evening? I may never having knowingly made my kids feel unsafe with my drinking, but was I, like my dad, choosing a drink over them? Most probably. Would drinking tonight and being unable to drive my daughter to her class be a version of this, too? Am I destined to be forever enthralled to a kind of tainted love? It’s similar to the feelings attached to the cigarettes I sneaked as a teenager (which were the same ones that, a few years earlier, I’d stolen from my parents to snap in half and stuff in the bin).
What is it about me that more than knows the harm in a thing, but wants to do it anyway?
You might be reading this thinking what the hell is she on about, all tied up over her couple of glasses of wine a week? You might drink this way and feel uncomplicated about it. Smug, even, because you might be well under the UK guideline maximum of 14 units a week — that’s six medium (175ml) glasses of 13% strength wine — and even if you sometimes get close to that you never drink all your units in one or even two sittings. You are aware of the risks of regularly exceeding this3 so you don’t get drunk, you don’t have problems maintaining relationships. You’re not an alcoholic.
Neither am I. But I am someone who now knows the risks drinking any alcohol does to both my short and longer-term health, particularly as our perimenopausal bodies change and processing it becomes even more of a struggle4. I’m someone who still allows alcohol a great deal of mental space regardless of this knowledge. Will I? Won’t I? Can I? Should I? If not tonight, then maybe tomorrow. A lowish ABV so I can drink a bit more of it. A small glass topped up with soda so I can nurse it for longer… It’s tiresome. So I’m asking myself honestly whether an hour of feeling pleasantly tipsy is worth all this mental labour, let alone the physical harms.
What would happen if I just stopped?
What would happen if you did?
Members, let’s meet in the comments. Looking for others’ words on this? Here are some of the most impactful posts I’ve read on other folks’ complex and lifelong relationships with alcohol from
, and , linked below.
Lindsay x
https://newsnetwork.mayoclinic.org/discussion/mayo-clinic-minute-why-alcohol-and-menopause-can-be-a-dangerous-mix/
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2025/feb/05/alcohol-related-deaths-in-uk-hit-record-high-of-10473
https://www.nhsinform.scot/healthy-living/alcohol/the-risks-of-drinking-too-much/
Read Prof. David Nutt’s 2022 book, Drink? The New Science of Alcohol + Your Health for this: https://www.yellowkitebooks.co.uk/titles/david-nutt/drink/9781529394726/
This was me, Lindsay, until I took the leap and did dry Jan. I agree with Chloe above that the deliberating, thinking, calculating, is the problem more than the booze often. I realised that when I drank, even if it was just a glass - although like you the glass was often a big one or more than one because I’d do a sneaky top up - I simply felt bad. I’d wake in the night to pee and would hold my head in my hands feeling bad. Whereas when I didn’t drink, I’d wake up and feel good. It wasn’t the physical effects, it was psychological. Although I also realised that drinking when making supper - also my habit / favourite time to drink - meant that come 9pm I often had a hangover, felt maudlin, sleepy, ashamed. The things that helped me was Substack, Clovers writing on sobriety, your writing about struggling with sobriety, various apps, and then Dry Jan. Now, weirdly, alcohol looks syrupy, cloying, it smells bad, and I don’t want to go near it. I went to my first social gathering the other night and noticed how chained people are to it. It was a leaving do at work, with speeches, and there were lines of glasses of wine,🍷 and in a break between speeches people would slip behind me to grab another drink, then another, and another, I could see the cogs of their brains, the hyper awareness of where they were in relation to that glass on the table, and how discreetly they could take another glass. Just one more. I know because I’ve been there. Alcohol does this to us, it ties us to it. It makes some of us very weak. But weirdly now I’ve stopped I don’t care about it anymore, in fact I dislike it. And I really really don’t want to go back to being its slave.
Right comments section, let’s go! Love all of this Lindsay, once again your honesty is brave and inspiring (wondering if you share my sense of shame about not having “resolved” this relationship to alc thing?) So much here resonates, particularly the pondering/bargaining about how much I should have, if any - I could take it or leave it but if my husband just buys a small something on the way home for me I’ll at least have the option … I’ve started buying the odd half bottle of red wine from the expensive bottle shop, thinking that would mean higher quality and less volume. And it does, except I so often end up not quite getting the buzz/guilt free enjoyment I used to. You nailed that this is all so personal and for some people the same amount is uncomplicated and unproblematic in their minds. But I sense the fact that I’m flip flopping and equivocating just MUST be a sign that I know this is NOT unproblematic for me. So I’m trying something new - no booze at home, just a clean rule of none vs the messiness of a little bit or not much but sometimes and all the agonising that involves. Lots of alc free beer and gin in the house if I need it (husband on his own journey too, still drinks more than he should but doing much better thanks to the non alcs). When I go out to pub or cinema or theatre or restaurant etc, I can drink, max 2 (I don’t go out that much so this feels ok!) I suspect the latter going out rule will evolve too but for now it feels ok. And this is really a path - for some of us - some stop suddenly, which I envy, but I think it’s ok to for the road to be messy and stop-starty and non-linear.