Blackout: Remembering the Things I Drank to Forget

I was worried men wouldn’t like dating a sober woman. After all, drinking was a part of our erotic social contract. It was a long-standing agreement that we would all drink away our nervousness and better judgment. I’d heard about men who got frustrated when their dates weren’t drinking. “How am I going to take advantage of you now?” one guy asked my friend, which was a joke, but a lot of uncomfortable truth was beneath the punch line. Alcohol is the greatest seduction tool ever invented, and to order a seltzer with lime is to take that shining scimitar out of a man’s hand and toss it in the nearby Dumpster.

 

I went to dinner again with the doctor. I was torn about him. He made me laugh. He was a great listener. But he cussed out some dude who cut him off in traffic. He told this overinvolved story about his ex and described her with various synonyms for “psycho.” The jeans: Was it shallow that I cared? That old pendulum swung in my mind the entire evening. I’m going to kiss him / Oh hell no, I’m not. I couldn’t tell if the tics that bothered me about him were red flags or convenient excuses to stay in my hidey-hole. I’d lost touch with my own gut instinct.

 

And I thought: If I could take a shot of Patrón, I could kiss him. If I could suck down the beer (or five) that he does not order on my behalf, then we could do this the way it is done. We could find ourselves wrapped in sheets, clothes in a heap near the foot of the bed, my tricky Grecian top in a tourniquet around my forearm because I was so frantic to rip it off, to be unloosed, to be free. And afterward we could evaluate. Do we work? Is this a thing? We could exchange flirtatious glances over brunch, or we could scatter to other corners of the galaxy and avoid each other in grocery stores. Either one was fine. But at least something would happen.

 

Something else happened instead. I sent him an email that took way too long to write. I can’t be more than friends with you. The drawbridge, which for a brief moment lowered, snapped shut again. I was so relieved.

 

When I said I would never have sex again, that probably sounded dramatic. The kind of grandiose proclamation a teenager makes before slamming the door to her room. It’s not as though every intimacy in my entire life had been warped by booze. 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.

 

Clearly, I needed a new map.

 

 

 

I KNEW ONLINE dating would come for me someday. It was the fate of all single women in their late 30s to stare down a personal profile, and as far as punishments go, this was fairly benign. Once, my type faced spinsterhood and destitution. Now I had to walk into the gallows of OK Cupid and drum up a good attitude about emoticons.

 

Online dating was not a bad move for me. It allowed me to inch toward intimacy with built-in distance. It granted me the clarity that “hanging out at the bar” often lacked. One of the great, unheralded aspects of Internet dating was that the word “dating” was in the title, thus eliminating any ambiguity. Were we dating? 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. So my “ABOUT ME” statement began “I used to drink, but I don’t anymore.” I’ve had stronger openings, but this one was good for now.

 

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 saw 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 email 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.com. I did it for Anna. She’d logged so much time listening to me complain about my ex. “Just try it,” she said, which is a very hard argument to win.

 

Sarah Hepola's books