I stopped drinking three years ago and it changed everything social
Posted as coffee_not_wine
- Looking for
- someone for whom an afternoon is as good as an evening
- Experience
- Fifteen years, both directions, and the last three quite different.
- Around
- the 11th, Paris
Almost every first meeting proposed to me on boards like this happens in a place whose entire purpose is drinking, at an hour that assumes it. I stopped three years ago and I do not intend to start again, and I have discovered how much of adult social life in this country is built around a glass.
Forty six, Paris, switch, fifteen years. I am not fragile about it and I do not mind at all if you drink in front of me. What I mind is the assumption, and the small awkwardness that follows when I order something else, and the number of times I have then had to have a conversation I did not want to have on a first meeting.
So: an afternoon, somewhere with coffee, or a long walk, or a museum, or lunch. Any of those. I am better company at three in the afternoon than I ever was at eleven at night.
Inside a dynamic, the relevant part is simply that nothing involving me happens near alcohol, in either direction. That has never once been a difficulty with anybody who was paying attention. I lead slightly more than I follow. What I want now is one person over a long period, seen weekly, with structure that develops slowly. I have very little appetite left for anything episodic.
I live alone in the west, I can host, my hours are ordinary. I write long messages and I answer within a day. If that is not your rhythm, we will find out quickly and neither of us will mind.