My first date in sobriety was with a guy I knew from college. When I saw him at the restaurant, he was more attractive than I remembered, though he was wearing jeans that either marked him as above fashion or distressingly behind it.
“I don’t mind if you drink,” I lied to him.
“I know,” he said, and ordered a Coke.
I was getting to the place where I needed to date. (Not want, mind you, but need.) In the cocoon of my crooked little carriage house, I watched documentaries back to back and unspooled fantasy lives with men I’d never met. The tattooed waiter who read Michael Chabon. The handyman with Paul Newman eyes. I could see myself losing years this way, living nowhere but between my ears.
So I forced myself out the front door with trembling hands and burgundy lip gloss. All dating is an unknown country, but as far as I knew, mine was uninhabitable. Even friends who didn’t struggle with raging booze problems were unclear how I was going to date without alcohol. “I don’t think I’ve ever kissed a guy for the first time without drinking,” said my 27-year-old coworker Tracy. And she was a professional sex writer.
How did this happen? We were worldly twenty-first-century women, who listened to sex podcasts and shared tips on vibrators and knew all the naughty peepholes of the Internet. And yet somehow we acquired all this advanced knowledge of sex—threesomes, BDSM, anal—and zero mastery over its most basic building block. The idea of kissing unmoored me. Touching a man’s lips to mine without the numbing agent of a three-beer buzz sounded like picking up a downed wire and placing it in my mouth.
After dinner, my old college friend took me to a coffee shop, where I drank hot chocolate on a breezy patio. I liked him. (Mostly.) He was a doctor. He remembered the oddest details about me from college, which was flattering, like he’d been thinking about me all along. I told him a poignant story about my past, because I sensed this was the scooching-closer portion of the evening, and he took my hand, which was resting on the table. Such a simple gesture: four fingers slipped into the crook of my own. But with that subtle and natural movement, my arm became encased in a block of ice. Oh God, the panic. I was afraid to pull away. I was afraid to invite him closer. I was like a doe who had spied the red laser sighting of a gun on my chest. Do not move.
They say drinking arrests your emotional development at the age when you start using it to bypass discomfort, and nothing reminded me of that like sex. In the year and a half since I’d quit, I had confronted so many early and unformed parts of myself, but sex continued to make me downright squeamish. I was horrified by the vulnerability it entailed. Sometimes I walked around in disbelief about blow jobs. Not that I’d given them, but that anyone had, ever.
As I sat on the patio with my frozen robot arm, I kept flashing to an alternate version of this date. The one where I poured rocket fuel down my throat and went barreling toward him with a parted mouth. Instead, when he dropped me off, I darted from his front seat so fast I practically left a cloud of dust. Thankyounicetoseeyougoodnight. I climbed into my bed and pulled the duvet up to my chin, and I understood that I was probably never going to have sex again. Because if you only know one road into town, and the road collapses, what can you do?
Alcohol was the beginning of sex. It was there the first time I kissed a guy, at the age of 13. It was there the last time I slept with a guy I’d only just met, two months before getting sober—a bartender at Lisa’s fortieth birthday party who spoke just enough English to convince me to leave with him. In the nearly quarter century that spanned those two points, alcohol let me be and act however I wanted. One of my favorite ways to have sex was right before a blackout, when I was still there but I’d gone feral, and I could let all those low and dirty words spill out of my mouth. Do this. Do that. But now I wasn’t sure if I liked sex that way because it felt good or because guys dug it when I got wild. That’s what I wanted more than my own pleasure. To make myself irresistible. To blow his freaking mind.