Declan Lynch

When your social life = drinking

“You’re not going to that event any more for the event. You’re going for the drink”

Of late, I have seen interviews with well-known people in which they have talked about going off the drink for a while. And, by coincidence, they were saying much the same thing about its effect on their social life.

Indeed, they were using almost exactly the same words — “my social life went to hell”; “my social life never recovered”; that sort of thing.

So this is a very common reaction, and not just on the part of well-known people.

Everyone who is getting a bit worried about their drinking will reach this point, at which they try to imagine what their lives would be like without drink, and usually they can’t get past that moment in which they see themselves forever excluded from life’s banquet. Forever on the outside looking in at these tremendous celebrations otherwise known as their ‘social life’.

And they are right up to a point, but they are also wrong in a very fundamental way. They are right about the fact that this social life of theirs, which clearly involves a lot of drinking, will not be the same at all without said drinking. But they are wrong in this perception of theirs that they have this thing called a ‘social life’ which exists in and of itself, and is merely enhanced by drinking.

My own deep researches into the subject told me that my ‘social life’ had become inextricably entangled with my drinking life, so that they had become essentially the same thing. So when people say that, without drink, they had no social life, what I am hearing is that, without drink, they had no drinking life.

Rather than being a statement which merits some consideration, which invites you to wonder if you should sacrifice this social life of yours for the sake of being free of alcohol, it is merely a statement of the completely obvious.

It’s like saying that you couldn’t possibly consider going off the drink, because that would involve going off the drink — which is fine, as long as you don’t think you’re making a valid point there.

Because this is how it works — you wouldn’t even be contemplating any change in your relationship with alcohol, if you weren’t finding that it was starting to dominate your life, all aspects of it, including your social life. Indeed, in most cases, it is probably dominating your social life more than other parts of your life, because that is the arena in which you’re doing most of your drinking.

And when it has reached the point where you can’t imagine going to any event without the prospect of drinking at it, then it stands to reason that you’re not going to that event any more for the event. You’re going for the drink.

Moreover, if you stop drinking, and you miss it because you have simply stopped going to things, stopped having that famous ‘social life’ that you used to have, you might decide that the only solution is to start drinking again — but you shouldn’t be under the impression that you’re doing this because of your love of the theatre, or because you just can’t stay away from those recitals in the NCH any more.

No, you’re not doing it for art, you’re doing it for alcohol. You are doing it basically because you can’t function any more, you can’t feel right in yourself, or in the world, without drink.

And you can deal with that any way you like, but tragically, there will probably come a time when you don’t have much choice in the matter.

But there is a choice you can make, before it gets to that stage — once you understand that, for you, there is no difference between drinking and socialising, then you only have to give up one of them, and you’re more or less sorted.

It’s called killing one bird with one stone.