Bumble. Tinder. Hinge. If modern dating were a game of bingo, over the last year or so, I scored a full house. I’ve dated commitment phobes, overgrown man-child clichés, conquests whose profile pictures demonstrated a mere fleeting relationship with the truth, and even a few gents along the way.
I’ve never dated a Dutchman though, which seems relevant only when you consider the one thing very intrinsically linked with today’s dating experience for almost every singleton I know is Dutch courage. Whether you favour pinot grigio, craft lager, the ubiquitous gin or a stiff whisky, alcohol is an integral part of any romp through app-based dating and, while I can’t comment on whether the Netherlands relies on hard liquor to oil the wheels of modern courtship, I can assure you that, having dated dozens of fellow Scots, Irish and Englishmen since emerging from the ashes of my torched marriage, if you were to rename inebriation Celtic courage or British bravery, you’d find little argument from me. So, when I embarked upon sobriety at the start of this year and didn’t immediately retreat from dating, the experience was, shall we say, enlightening.
It’s worth admitting at this point that in my twenties and early thirties, I more than fitted into my homeland’s alcohol culture. Having always believed myself to be naturally shy and anxious, booze was my social lubricant of choice, and I’d rarely met a problem I wouldn’t at least attempt to drown in merlot. But as I entered my mid-thirties, I noticed that while my nights out were getting shorter and less frequent, my hangovers (and accompanying hangxiety, to borrow today’s hackneyed sober justifier du jour) were becoming longer and more all-encompassing. Over the course of a couple of years, I became sober curious.
Dipping my toe in with 2018’s Dry January, and later Sober October, left me feeling perkier. Come 2019, I tried Sober Spring, and finished my 100-day challenge newly calm, better rested and with new hobbies that I was loathe to give up in favour of a return to the pub. And now, as I write this, eight months dry, I have no intention of jumping from the wagon any time soon.
All of which, I think, qualifies me to say this: Single? It’s time to try dating sober.
If, like sober date number four, that statement makes you want to run as fast as you can away from me, I ask you to please hear me out. I am not here to convert you. I’m not going door-to-door singing the gospel of temperance. You like a tequila or six before you dance on tables of a Friday night? Hey, you do you. I’ll happily drive you home. What I am saying is that, as painful as it is to begin with (and I admit, a bad drink-free date can be a draining experience), sober dating is the best thing I ever did for myself.
Self-respect in sobriety
During my early forays into the dating scene, like many women, I tried to give men the benefit of the doubt. No immediate chemistry? Let’s see if it emerges after a couple of glasses of wine… Hot man seems like an arrogant tosspot? Oh well, he’s still hot when his arrogance becomes less annoying after a bottle of shiraz. Sober, this tolerance turned to dust. The mature student who showed up in a grubby, ripped hoodie? He got the 23 minutes it took my Uber to find me. The guy who was all ‘we we we’ on a date one coffee but went oddly quiet straight after suggesting date two with drinks – and learning that mine would be a soda? Done, done, and I’m onto the next one.
If the aim of dating is to find true love, I guess my alcohol-free escapades were a roaring success. For, as I found my sober sea legs, learned to dance with nothing but a 0% beer to boost me and started favouring a long bath over a night listening to the drone of another boring bloke, I did indeed fall for someone new – myself. I began to shed the broken shell I’d hidden in since the breakdown of my marriage. I started to recognise the qualities my amazing tribe of girlfriends saw in me. I learned to believe them when they said I was a catch and, as such, my standards became higher. Much higher.
Men I’d previously have considered worthy of further exploration found themselves out of contention as I stopped seeking a partner to quench my loneliness and started to genuinely enjoy my single life. I stopped fearing the idea of getting naked with a new person for the first time in more than a decade and started learning to love the body that was now seeing me through boxing classes and wild swimming sessions with abandon. I learned that, once you overcome those nerves, sober sex is far, FAR more satisfying than any drunken fumble, not least because it happens entirely on your terms or it doesn’t happen at all. In short, I found my worth, and stopped bargaining it down to meet Tinder’s lowly standards.
After a few weeks of sobriety, I changed my approach to dating altogether. I stopped holding long, rambling conversations on text and started biting the bullet, meeting new connections quickly to determine whether there was chemistry worth pursuing before dedicating hours of my now precious time to conversations that were going nowhere.
Mostly, the spark was absent. I became ok with this. Then, after a few months of dating without the aid of my beer goggles, the comedy of the experience started to wear thin. The joke became old. And I decided to embrace my increasingly satisfying single life and delete the apps. I said buzz off to Bumble. I shut Hinge. But as I prepared to set fire to my Tinder icon, a new connection caught my eye. Intrigued, I fired off a somewhat stupid message, telling myself that if I didn’t get a reply within the hour, I’d go ahead with the final app bonfire. Reader, he messaged. And once we’d exchanged numbers, I burned that bloody app for the last time.
Knowing your worth
Today, as I type this with the giddy grin of the nauseatingly in love plastered across my face, I have come to a couple of conclusions. The relationship I have now is built upon an honesty that I was never brave enough to embrace before. Having learned to accept, rather than hide, my own flaws, I have found a man willing to do the same only because I stopped settling for ones who would not. I was able, for the first time in my adult life, to put my own needs and wants first, to believe myself deserving of happiness and rule out anything that didn’t make my soul sing. And that, I think, is the true happy ending of this story.
In the sober light of day, after dating a host of perfectly nice men who simply didn’t light my fire, I gained clarity about what my ideal relationship looked like. And having stopped needing another person in my life, I was able to recognise someone I deeply wanted in it, who made my days more fun and exciting by simply being in them. Sobriety has brought me confidence and killed my anxiety to such a degree that I am now able to see that safety and sex appeal are not mutually exclusive. It is possible to fancy the pants off a man, for him to make you weak at the knees, but for his love to be demonstrated in small acts of kindness – cups of tea, forehead kisses and mowing the lawn without being asked – rather than via the kind of fiery tempestuousness that can be dangerously misconstrued as passion when three sheets to the wind.
But the best thing about sober dating? It doesn’t half sort the men from the boys. Let’s be frank – as problematic as it is to admit, a not negligible number of men still operate under the belief that it’s easier to bed a drunk woman, so a certain proportion of jerks (we’re looking at you, dick pic DM’ers) will be immediately put off by sobriety. This is a VERY GOOD THING. Having weeded those horrors out from the get go, you’re then left trying to make conversation with a stranger without anything to loosen your tongue. That’s no mean feat. But the new acquaintance who has the confidence and conversational chops to chat endlessly without any substances to alter the experience? Well, that’s a person you want to know.
It’s tempting to see sobriety as stark and unyielding, a bit monochrome. But what I’ve found, after powering through first dates with men who assumed my ginger beer order was an indicator of control freak tendencies, an inability to let go, or even rampant alcoholism, is that our culture sells us a lie. It tells us that we find our truth at the bottom of a bottle when, in fact, it’s our sober selves that reveal us in our full technicolour glory. And let me tell you, when you find someone who loves you, completely and entirely, without the inhibition-shedding aid of booze? Well, ladies, that’s enough to make you feel quite drunk…
