A Brief History of My Wildly Unsuccessful, Non-Alcoholic Dating Life

I didn’t always fail. At a daytime roof party, the lawyer I was with downed margaritas while I stuck with cold brew, and no one seemed to notice. At the park with a novelist, we both showed up empty-handed and had a totally pleasant time. But I kept coming up against the same problem: If I actually liked the person, I’d drink with them. I never tested my dates’ tolerance for my low-ABV lifestyle, because my low-ABV lifestyle was a lie.

Eventually I gave up on my rules. At a bar with a music executive, I ordered a mezcal cocktail right out of the gate. I split frozen margaritas with a Silicon Valley transplant. Negronis with a drummer. Oysters and champagne with a nurse. Whiskey and ginger ale with a photographer while we danced until the sun rose. I had the kind of carefree, high-intensity nights I’d been craving, and I paid for it: with lack of sleep, loss of productivity, lapsed friendships, and actual dollars (the follow-up to this essay will be called “My Low-Budget Single Life”).

Thanks to wellness culture, we’re supposedly living in the golden age of not drinking. And thanks to the apps, we’re supposedly living in the golden age of dating too. But these trends do not, in my experience, overlap. Alcohol still has a choke hold on dating culture because dating is still one of the most stressful things we do by choice. And the apps, despite their illusion of frictionless romance, have made dating even harder. By the time you show up at the bar, you’ve looked through an infinite scroll of strangers, squinted at photos, made some arbitrary judgments, sent some messages, almost bailed at least six times, and are now hoping, by some algorithmic miracle, that you’ve picked someone you’ll like and who will also like you.

Alcohol smooths these anxieties. It helps you forget those epic battles you fought to get yourself in the room. The only thing that those well-branded, nonalcoholic spirits do is make you have to pee.

And feel guilty. One of the fancy bottles promised “a night where social isn’t sinful and self-care doesn’t stop at sunset.” A nonalcoholic rosé infused with crystal energy was billed as “social, sippable, self-care.” But why should self-care be a 24/7 job, one that includes eating right, exercising, sleeping eight hours, bathing with candles, getting a daily dose of crystal energy, and being mindful, not just at yoga class but all the time?

When do we get to lose our minds? When do we get to stop self-care-ing and be total hedonists? I’m not saying alcohol isn’t bad for you. It is, of course, too good at letting us forget ourselves sometimes. What I’m saying is: Self-care can look a lot of different ways, and maybe there’s a kind of mindfulness in knowing when to let go.

At least for me there was. That summer, dating was about escaping the grinding hour-by-hour work of getting over heartbreak. It was about stealing a few hours of fun during an otherwise brutal time. And I think that counts as balance. You spin out for a while, you reel yourself in. You have a Negroni. Some days you have two.