Dating sober
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Good sex was about the person you were with and, maybe more important, the person you could be while you were with them. Jesus Sober and Still Have Fun with Sober Dating As someone who's trying to maintain your sobriety, you know firsthand how difficult it can be to find dating sober or even someone to date who's open to staying sober. I understood that not drinking—and not drinking to such an extent that it was the first detail I sincere about myself—would turn off certain guys. Normal gives me uncomfortable side glances and keeps me at a perpetual distance. Keep it breezy and keep it light. You can just be yourself and come together with those who have the same beliefs and values. Here you will anon get acquainted with like-minded people, broaden horizons, share your dating sober, make tons of new friends, gain new unforgettable impressions, fall in love and build long-term relationships, turning your life into an incredible adventure and making it more eventful and interesting with each passing day. So, here are some elements to help you navigate the wild world of dating without drinking. When love and sex get mixed in, the whole shebang gets even stickier.
After I got sober, I worried I'd never have sex again. This may sound dramatic, the kind of grandiose proclamation a teenager makes before slamming the door to her room. But I'd ruined my sole romantic strategy: get drunk, see what happens. I had no idea how to get close to a man without alcohol. Booze had given me permission to do and say anything I wanted, but now that I was sober, the only thing I wanted most days was to watch Netflix. It's not as though every intimacy in my entire life had been warped by drinking. I'd had quiet sex, and giggling sex, and sex so delicate it was like a soap bubble perched on the tip of my finger. I knew such joy could exist between two people, but I had no clue how to get to it anymore. My only directions involved taking a glass of wine to my lips and letting the sweet release show me the way. That's what forced me into online dating. It was the fate of all single women in their late thirties to stare down a personal profile, and as far as punishments go, this was fairly benign. And online dating was not a bad move for me. It allowed me to inch toward intimacy with built-in distance. One of the great, unheralded aspects of Internet dating was that the word dating was in the title, thus eliminating any ambiguity. Was this a date? The answer was yes. It also allowed me to say up front: I don't drink. I'd worried so much about how to reveal this. I didn't want to watch some guy's face fall when I ordered a Diet Coke and then endure the pecks of his curiosity. I understood that not drinking—and not drinking to such an extent that it was the first detail I shared about myself—would turn off certain guys. I could picture them sniffing around my profile. Those bearded eccentrics with their fluency in HBO shows and single-malt Scotch. How I missed those beautiful, damaged men, but we kept our distance from each other. Occasionally I would e-mail one of them, and they never wrote back, and I got it. Back when I was drinking, I wouldn't have responded to me either. My first weeks on the site were choppy, but I soon became accustomed to the routine. The endorphin blast of attraction. The coy banter that allowed you to tease out someone's personality. Flirting was like any exercise: it got easier the more you did it. This wasn't the first time I had tried online dating. About six months after I moved to New York, I signed on to Match. I did it for my friend Anna, who'd logged countless hours listening to me complain about my ex. I bought a bottle of sauvignon blanc that night and sipped my way onto a plateau of cleverness. I didn't want a profile that was drab and ordinary. I wanted a personal statement that grabbed every guy by the collar and whispered each word into his mouth. I swear I was in love with myself by the time I finished, a bottle having morphed into a six-pack of beer, and I posted the hottest picture of myself I had: a close-up taken by a professional photographer in which I appeared 20 pounds lighter than I was. I woke up the next day to a kitchen clogged with cigarette smoke, and the memory surfaced in pieces: I think I joined a dating site last night. I got several messages on the site that day, but two stood out. One was from a successful businessman with silver hair. The other was from an indie-rock type who frequented a burger shop less than two blocks from my front door. Those two men had nothing in common, except that they both wanted to meet. Having portrayed myself as the overthinking hedonist's Marilyn Monroe, I could not bear to disappoint them. There was not a pair of Spanx in the world big enough to bridge the distance between the woman on that site and the woman who stood in my kitchen, pacing in jogging pants. So I pulled my profile down. This story was one of a thousand reminders that dating was never easier when I was drinking. Alcohol may have turned me into Cinderella for a few radiant hours, but I would wake up in dishrags again, crying about the messes I'd made. This time, the process of finding the right person on the site was more honest, but it was also slow. A lot of dead-end conversations. A lot of dudes in camo posing in front of their giant trucks. I was growing antsy. Some days I thought about finding a random dude and just banging him. What was wrong with me? Why did I think sex was something I needed to get over with? My first online date was with a divorced father who was an immigration lawyer. He was nice, but not for me. When he offered to make me a lavish meal on Valentine's for our third date, I knew the only proper response was to gently fold up the tent on our time together. He deserved to spend that holiday with someone who felt differently about him. I was starting to learn one of the most important lessons of online dating: the wisdom of saying no. All my life I fought to say yes. I was shy and ambitious, a terrible mix, and so I tried to dismantle my isolationist tendencies. Yes to this party I don't want to go to, yes to this person I don't want to date, yes to this assignment I'm afraid to botch, because saying yes was the path to a remarkable life. I needed to say yes, because I needed to push myself off the couch and into the swift-moving stream of hurt and jubilation. But saying yes to everything meant repeatedly saying no to my own better judgment, or drinking myself to the point where I had none. Now my job was to sort out the possibilities with more caution: which risks are not worth it, and which ones deserve a jump. I said no to the smart guy who wasn't attractive to me. I said no to the cocky guy who was. I said no to the graphic designer who tried to kiss me one night. Our date was fun. I ran the pool table twice , and his eyes roamed along my ass as I lined up my shot, and I was surprised to find I liked that. But he slurped down three bourbons in 90 minutes, and when he leaned forward to kiss me, I was grossed out by the sour smell of his breath, the slump of his eyes, and I ducked. Like in a sitcom, I literally ducked. It was a revelation to me how unappealing men were when they were drunk. Back when I was dating my college boyfriend Patrick, who was sober, he would pull away from me when I was buzzed and handsy. I felt so sexy in those moments; it only followed I must have looked that way. Now I realized what a sadistic game drinking played. It built up your confidence at the very moment you were looking your worst. After the comical way I ducked the graphic designer's kiss, I was certain I'd never hear from him again. But he texted me the next day. Turns out, I accidentally inflamed his desire. I went out with him again, but something crucial was lacking. It felt foreign on my tongue. I went out with a guy I'll call Ben. He had brown eyes that caught the light. We sat in a bar that was delightfully sleazy, and he drank a beer and I drank water, and nothing was forced or uncomfortable about this arrangement, which was shocking in itself. He asked me why I quit drinking, and I told him. I asked why he and his wife split, and he told me. We both baby-stepped toward each other, one refusal to lie at a time. I understand if you never want to see me again, but you should know all that. What the hell, he was different. We sat outside a gelato store with our feet kicked up on the railing, and we talked about pornography. I can't remember now who opened the door in the conversation leading to the hallway that contained beaver shots, but he told a story about the first dirty picture he ever saw. Hustler magazine, the hardcore stuff. All these women spreading their labias, six of them stacked on the page like bricks in a wall, and he felt a little ruined by it. Because after that, he needed so much just to get the same scorpion sting. He'd gone to college during a wave of antiporn sentiment in the late '80s, and he'd learned to be ashamed of his desires. Then he got married. Then the marriage caved. Now all he wanted was to dig himself out of the rubble and figure out who he was. I let him kiss me that night. A lovely, soft, and unfrightening kiss. It was nice to learn that rejection didn't have to burn. One night in April, I went out with a guy who was studying psychology. We ate at a fried chicken restaurant, one of those trendy places where they served comfort food that used to be trashy. The guy talked fast, and I enjoyed the thrill of trying to keep up. It was nice to be on the other side for a change. There would be no soft stroking of my hair. No spray of rose petals across the bed. But in fact I did want to fuck. I'd gone nearly two years without sex. Two years without drinking, or smoking, or fucking. Sometimes it's best not to wait for the perfect movie moment; those can leave you checking your watch for a long time. Afterward, we stared up at the ceiling of his bedroom as though it contained a moon. I know there is a woman who would have left that invitation alone, but I was not her. There it was, my big chance to get sex right again, and I went and screwed an asshole. Maybe I should have felt crestfallen, but I didn't. I chalked it up to a learning curve. I never saw him again, and no one was worse for the experience. Actually, I was glad for the experience, because it taught me that good sex wasn't a function of sobriety, any more than good sex was a function of being drunk. Good sex was about the person you were with and, maybe more important, the person you could be while you were with them. I started seeing a musician. He was gone too much of the time, and it was never going to work, but I wanted to try. When he looked at me, I had the giddy feeling of a three-beer buzz. Then my knees spaghettied underneath me as he walked toward me once, and I realized: Oh my God, this actually happens. The first time he and I had sex, I barely remembered it. The whole afternoon was white light and the dance of tree shadows through the windows. He kissed me on the couch, and then he kissed me on the stairs, and then I took him to my bed. And then time stopped. In the years that followed, I would have more sex like this. Sex that felt good and right. And I noticed when I was with a person I felt comfortable with, I could walk across the room without smothering myself in a blanket. I could let myself be seen. And I noticed when I stopped worrying so much about how I looked, I could lose myself more in how I felt. I always thought good sex without alcohol would be sharp with detail, saturated with color, but instead it was more like a 4 p. Pleasure shuts down the recorder in the brain. The flood of serotonin and dopamine creates a white-hot burst of ecstasy. For decades, I drank myself to reach that place of oblivion. Why hadn't I known the oblivion could come to me? About three years into my sobriety, I was on a plane from Dallas to New York. The guy beside me was 23. Rumpled and exhausted from staying up all night. He slumped beside me and flashed the sideways grin of a boy who gets what he wants. He was moving there to be an actor. Oh, baby, you are screwed, I thought, but I didn't say this. Instead, we talked about leaps of faith. We talked about Denzel, his favorite actor. I tried to prepare him for disappointment, as I'm sure everyone did: Don't make fame the measure of success, I told him, make this move about learning something. It was an early morning flight, and around us heads tilted back with eyes closed and mouths open, so we whispered like two kids talking behind the teacher's back. We talked so intensely that a three-and-a-half-hour plane ride felt like 30 minutes. I noticed all the times he touched my knee. I was nearly 40, used up in some corners of history, and men my age were often chasing women with luscious rumps and tits that had yet to sag. I wasn't looking for younger guys, but they seemed to find me anyway. Maybe they sensed I was not interested in commitment yet. Or maybe they liked the grooves of a hand that knew its own strength. I was done trying to be anyone else. It was his first day in New York, and it was only 11 a. I paid for the cab ride to the Ace Hotel, just south of Midtown, a place where musicians and writers often stayed, and I treated him to lunch at the restaurant, full of charm and bustle. We sat on the couch in the lobby, my legs on his lap. We were surrounded by strangers typing on their laptops, headphones on. Did they notice us? What did they see? He traced his fingers around mine as my hand rested on his knee. Have you ever noticed how astonishing it can be, holding hands with a person? Such an everyday thing, such a nothing gesture. But two hands, barely touching each other. It can feel like flying. He kissed me then. Right in front of all those people. They were too busy with Twitter and Facebook to pay attention. You're going to leave now? I was going to leave now. But I gave him my number, and I told him to text me if he ever needed me, and I walked out to the bustling sidewalk, feeling so light. From the book , by Sarah Hepola. This article originally appears in the May 2015 issue of ELLE.
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