“I don’t drink,” non-drinkers say proudly. “Never have. NEVER will!” They add that they’ve never experimented with drugs, taken a drag off a cigarette, and they don’t even drink coffee or soda now. Then, just when you think they’re done, they add, “AND I won’t put anything with high fructose corn syrup in my body either!” This is all important to them, but they’ll punctuate their rant with, “I’ve never taken a drink of alcohol.”

My guess is that their message starts out as a noble, humble “If I can do this anyone can” gesture that they hope inspires us to think it’s not necessary to drink to have a good time. They also want to send the message that alcohol does not fill the voids, salve the wounds, or anything else we might attach to alcohol, and they want us to view them as a shining beacon of that message.

The idea that anyone can graduate from college without ever taking a drink astounds some of us, and we’re generous with our praise. We do this because sobriety is a laudable goal, but we know we couldn’t have done it. The message of the sober-for-life crowd is that they were strong enough to avoid the temptation, and that is large part of the equation, but for those of us who caved to peer pressure, it was also about that Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) element.

Sobriety is, was, and always will be a laudable goal, don’t get me wrong, but some of the sober-for-life crowd repeat their message so often that rest of us view the messenger as obnoxious, smug, and so repetitive that the message gets lost in the perceived pursuits of the messenger. My guess is that those who chose sobriety for life have put up with so much over the years/decades that now that many are turning their backs on alcohol, this is their time to shine. I also think they enjoy the praise and the shock so much that they repeat their message as often as they can.

I’m not one of those who say, “C’mon, you know you have. How about at church? did you drink the wine?” I’m not one of those who hunts for hypocrisy or calls people out in any way I can. I accept their testimonial at face value, applaud it, and move on. They can’t. They cannot help but go so over the top that we get sick of hearing about it. They cannot talk about a vacation they took with a group of people, without saying, “Of course, I don’t drink. Never have. NEVER will! But they didn’t know that.” I might admire them, if they could say that without appearing smug, obnoxious, and superior, and I might be in awe of them if they could talk about their lifelong sobriety responsibly.  

The awe I express is a result of me picturing them in my high school, my college years, and my early years in the workforce. “How did you escape high school and college without drinking one alcoholic drink? How did you make friends?” I realize that writing that reveals something about the people I hung around and me, but I consider defeating peer pressure by maintaining sobriety during those years so implausible as to be impossible. We even frowned on responsible drinking when I was a teen. “Responsible drinking? Isn’t that for people in their sixties?” We thought that was such a great line, so hilarious and all that, because we thought it was true. Some were strong, they accepted the requisite beer, and they milked it for hours. It was admirable, but they still broke down. No one I know was forceful enough to defeat the dark side.

I might be wrong, but I think it’s easier to avoid drinking now than it was in my youth. Sobriety is just more acceptable now, and I think the current generation has our generation to thank for that, because they didn’t have to grow up in bars, they weren’t subjected to their dad’s drunken behavior, and they didn’t grow up thinking you had to have a drink in your hand to have a good time. I’m sure young people still have some peer pressure to drink, smoke, and consume high fructose corn syrup, but when I hear someone my age managed to maintain a life of sobriety, I’m doubly impressed, because I know what I went through. If we didn’t have a drink in hand in those years, not only would the party’s host view it as an insult, but we’d get that look from our peers. “C’mon, I thought you were all about fun?”

***

“I feel sorry for people who don’t drink, because when they wake up in the morning, that’s as good as they’re going to feel all day.” –Frank Sinatra.  

“I don’t drink,” a friend of mine said. “Never have. NEVER will!”   

“That’s great,” we say, “but I was just asking you if you’ve ever been to a Piggly Wiggly. It’s a supermarket.” 

“I don’t drink.” 

“It has nothing to do with drinking,” we say. “I just thought it was an unusual name for a supermarket, and I wondered if you’ve ever been to one.” 

We could be talking about cracks in the sidewalk, and this guy would find a way to slip a note into the conversation about his lifelong sobriety. Again, “Bravo!” and all that, but after so many repeated reminders, it does start to lose its luster. If you’ve ever met this guy, you know you’ll walk away without knowing his last name, his politics, his religion, or his ethnic heritage, but you’ll know he doesn’t drink, and he NEVER will! They say it so often that on those occasions when they don’t bring it up, it feels odd and creates a void that you’re waiting for them to fill. 

“It’s all about my mama,” he said. “I know how ashamed she would be if I showed up to her home loaded or recovering from a hangover.” He says that on Monday, but on Tuesday, it’s all about brain cells. “I’ll bet I could hold my own against anyone, one-on-one in a debate, because you’ve all killed so many brain cells over the years that I just have a natural advantage over you.”  

If he was a former alcoholic (I know, no one is a former alcoholic), we could understand him bragging about his sobriety all the time. Sobriety is an achievement for someone who was so addicted that alcohol wrecked their life for a chunk of time. We also know that most alcoholics don’t drink to excess because they like the taste. It satisfies some inner need, it fills a void, it defeats an internal demon, and it keeps the forces narrowing in on them at bay. They’re losing those fights so badly that the only, temporary relief they find comes from the contents of a bottle. If, however, you claim that you’ve “Never drank, and they NEVER will!” I guess we could claim that you won by not succumbing to the idea that alcohol is an answer, but you didn’t defeat the temptation of alcohol, because you never really played.

So, if you are a former alcoholic, I’ll sing your praises, applaud, or do whatever I can to encourage your fight. If I’m your party host, and you claim that you’ve never had it, NEVER will, I’ll just say, “Okay, what would you prefer to drink then?” Who cares, in other words. You’re not fighting demons or anything else. You’ve made a laudable lifelong decision and bravo for doing it. At some point, however, it just becomes a preference. If you’re still in your teens-to-twenties and in what I consider the heat of the battle, I might applaud you, because I know the peer pressure to maintain sobriety is intense. If you’ve never had a drink your entire life, and you’re 40+ years in, it’s just kind of who you are at this point, why do you still feel the need to talk about it so often?  

If you’ve never had chocolate and never will, it’s a preference, but I’ve never met someone who brags about never eating chocolate. If you’ve never had pie your whole life, you don’t bring it up at parties, in casual conversations, or in other social situations. You just don’t like pie. If you’ve never worn a T-shirt in public, “Never have. NEVER will!” most people don’t trumpet that. It just is, but people who have never had a drink of alcohol and brag about it so often make me think they are either on the verge of taking a sip, or they use it to feel superior to the rest of us who do drink.

“I don’t drink,” non-drinkers say proudly. “Never have. NEVER will!” Some say this in a manner that suggests they are on offense, and that my reflexive reaction should be a defensive one. It creates an odd magnetic repulsive force (similar to the force of the other side of the magnet) between us that I end by saying, “Well good for you,” I say, which defuses the tension and creates a different, weird tension of deflated expectations. I think they expect me to mount some sort of defense of alcohol, but I don’t know anyone who would defend alcohol, unless they said, “I don’t see anything wrong with drinking responsibly.”

I’m sure former, (lapsed, or however they identify themselves) alcoholics would say I used to be an alcoholic, if they read my story. I would say, at worst, I used to be a binge-alcoholic. I could go an entire week, even a month, without drinking, but when those high school, college, or co-worker, Friday night parties arrived, I got slaughtered. I don’t view that as a brag, or anything admirable, but I never craved alcohol. I didn’t like the taste of beer, wine, or anything harder. After years of sobriety, I tried craft beer and discovered that beer could actually tasted good, but at most I drank maybe two of them a night. In my younger years, alcohol was a social lubricant, and it was a way to drop my social inhibitions. Some said I was more fun and funnier when I had a few beers in me, and I thought I was too, but I admittedly did not know the limits social advocates talk about when they define responsible drinking. I’m quite sure a psychiatrist or psychologist could find a whole host of ghosts and demons that were chasing after me back then, but I didn’t see it. I thought I was drinking to excess for excessive fun. Now that it’s all over, and I don’t drink to get a buzz, drunk, or slaughtered anymore, I still don’t see the any harm in what I did back then. I now down the occasional craft beer, and while the newsfeed articles talk about “What drinking just one glass of alcohol does to your body,” I don’t see the need to stop.