It’s been more than a year since I divorced alcohol – which began as an attempt to wrest some control over a life thrown into a tumble dryer by the rude intrusions of a pandemic. Questions fielded from fellow 30-somethings since then have hinted more at curiosity than taboo. “Why did you suddenly choose to give up alcohol?” The answer: the ranking of health in the pecking order of life priorities rises as the creases of age begin to appear.
Those health benefits were predictably felt. My higher-than-desired cholesterol dropped 0.8 mmol/L in the year sans booze. “If you keep up with this trend, you’ll be on track to reaching your target,” my doctor encouraged.
I made the decision to stop drinking only months after being Covid-catapulted across the planet, along with many Australian emigrants. I left behind communities and friendships I’d established in the pre-Covid decade spent abroad, first in Beirut then in Washington. I had not lived in the city of my upbringing, Melbourne, since said upbringing. Childhood friendships and extended family were all that remained, but as I discovered – as years had passed and trajectories drifted – those friendships had been made for their moment.
“A lot of people have this misconception that friends from high school are actually going to be friends forever,” Michelle Lim, clinical psychologist and loneliness researcher at Swinburne University, tells me.
“Your needs change as you grow, which means your friendship circles will change as you grow.”
That presented me with a confounding context. I was surrounded by the familiar, but felt entirely foreign. I needed to build a new relationship with my city of birth. But as I faced the prospect of making new friends more suited to who I am now, I realised socialising would prove to be the biggest challenge of decoupling from alcohol.
Bad as it was for my cholesterol, drinking was integral to my social life throughout adulthood. It was a weapon that broke down barriers and allowed for human bonding. In places where shared languages – or values – were absent, alcohol became the common tongue. I’d factored none of this into my decision to cut it out.
Myriad paths exist to making friends while sober. At least 17,000, if the responses to one Reddit thread asking the very question are any indication. But the overwhelming majority of advice boils down to two suggestions: join a local community group or take up a group activity.
The problem with these well-meaning tips is that too often “meeting” people is conflated with befriending them, and they are not one and the same. Building intimate friendships – those that truly serve as a barricade against loneliness – requires more profound elements: trust and affinity.
Friendship exists on a spectrum, and certain cultures reflect this with language. Arabic, for example, contains no single word for “friend”, but rather has a variety of words to describe the importance of the relationship. Nadeem could be applied to an acquaintance you might frequent bars with because they’re the only one available, khalil means a friend dear to the heart, which is again distinguished from safi – a confidante and best friend with admirable values.
“If you think about our deepest friendships, they don’t come out of the blue,” Lim says. “They have been built quite organically over the years.”
If we strive for quality in our friendships – the khalils and safis – then a fitness studio or book club only serves as an entry point. The hard work is in cultivating a new acquaintance, even one with overlapping interests, into a trustworthy friend. It’s in this process that I’d previously found alcohol to be an invaluable ally.
On one particular “drinks night” sober, I noticed I could only keep up with conversation until those around me began to sink deeper into intoxication. It’s incredible how alcohol distorts what might be considered amusing.
A 2015 study from social policy and addiction researcher Dr Sarah MacLean, which interviewed 60 young drinkers in Melbourne, found that “alcohol’s disinhibitory effect” allowed for a deepening of trust and greater intimacy in the friendship.
“Study participants noted that being drunk provided a warrant to talk about things that otherwise could not be said, and to move their bodies in a way that would not be possible if they were sober,” MacLean wrote.
Upon reflection, all of my close friendships over the years have been forged through a similar process. Alcohol casts a liberating spell, unmasking constrained aspects of our characters, which acts as an accelerant in deepening a friendship.
“Alcohol is a kind of cheaty, fast way to get comfortable with somebody,” says Roger Patulny, associate professor of sociology at the University of Wollongong.
There’s a reason it is known as “liquid courage”.
“Often people use alcohol to relieve anxiety, specifically social anxiety, because they don’t know how to strike a conversation,” Lim says.
Social interaction is a skill, Lim adds, and one that we never truly practise if we constantly turn to alcohol to amplify our interactions.
It was clear, in my case, that there would be no immediate switch. Social skills would take time to develop, like learning to balance a bike without training wheels. All these years, alcohol had been a social stabiliser and now I needed to ride without.
And yet, we live in a society where for many, the training wheels never come off. Alcohol is both the default for enabling unfettered social interaction and celebrated for it.
Like most western cultures, Australian society largely follows an “individualistic model”, Patulny says. Individualism, according to a 2010 cross-cultural study of social anxiety, heightens our “embarrassability” and “fear of negative evaluations” because we draw our self-esteem from distinguishing ourselves from those around us, thus emphasising how we are perceived in a group setting.
“Anxiety is very much characterised by a fear of negative evaluation – ‘I might say the wrong thing; I might embarrass myself’,” Lim says.
Such social anxieties, prevalent in more individualistic societies like Australia’s, eventually lead to greater alcohol consumption, US researchers found in a 2008 study.
So, turning the alcohol tap off was not simply about finding new friends in alcohol-free zones, but unpacking my approaches to friendship and confronting the social anxieties that necessitated drinking in the first place.
Ironically, Melbourne’s many lockdowns provided the two tools to practise my sober social skills and re-examine my approach to friendship: proximity and frequency. With movement restrictions imposed for lengthy periods, I had little choice but to engage the local community if human interaction was to be had. And that, according to Lim, has always been an obvious avenue to developing meaningful friendships.
“Do we know our neighbours? Do we know our community? Do we have friends that live near us already where we can improve the relationship?” Lim queries.
Sometimes the obvious friendships are those closest to you, literally. Proximity allows for a greater frequency of interaction and a more regular social scene – a rival accelerant to alcohol. When you see people all the time, you start to get comfortable and the inhibitions fall away organically.
It’s why, Lim says, we often think our closest friendships were formed in high school, because “you see the same people time and time again for a very long period”.
In the nearly two decades of my family living at their property, I hardly knew any of our neighbours. But by the time 2021 had ended, barbecues, dinners and games nights among the neighbourhood had become almost routine. Trust, I found, was built through frequent gestures of support and generosity. A neighbour would occasionally drop food at the door. Others would help with chores.
Total strangers a year prior were now entering in and out, in scenes reminiscent of 1980s Neighbours episodes. Upon reflection, wherever I lived abroad, the friends I developed were often those within a five-to-10-minute radius from home.
After more than a year of practising my alcohol-free social skills, I can confirm I’ve progressed on from “beginner” mode. With each social interaction, my confidence grew.
Where I felt awkward with groups – particularly drinking groups – a year ago, I now feel an ease. I can engage in conversation, laugh and partake in silly jokes, match energy levels and allow a less inhibited version of myself out of its cage.
Lim describes this process of relearning as “trial and error”. I’m under no illusions that my new friendships are eternal, but interests and circumstances, largely brought on by the pandemic, have intersected at this specific juncture. A silver lining, perhaps, from 262 days of lockdown.
The old adage that people who don’t drink are incapable of fun has been proven false, at least in my experience. All it took was practice.
