Make Mine a Double: Why Women Like Us Like to Drink (Or Not)

One Not-So-Simple Question

178 beth jones ฀ t One Not-So-Simple Question igrew up in suburban New Jersey in the 1970s, and like so many of us who turned eighteen when that was the legal drinking age, my life is replete with drunken, drooling exploits. Before I hit that magic age of drinking and voting, I often lied to my parents about my whereabouts, took the 82 bus across the George Washington Bridge, the A train downtown, and repeatedly flourished a fake id made from my mother’s discarded driver’s license . I was in a sickening stupor the night my ex-boyfriend, the famous brewer, asked me out. I spent a night reassembling furniture and sponging up blood after a Lithuanian guy arrived at my high-school best friend’s party with a machete and a bad attitude . There were too many tequila shots in Baton Rouge. Too much vodka in Venezuela. A lot of stumbling down Manhattan sidewalks. But I figured a book about women and alcohol would be bursting with uproarious or wrenching drinking tales, told through the hazy dual lenses of liquor and time, so instead, I e-mailed a simple question to a dozen girlfriends. “Why do you drink?” I asked. I thought I’d get a few clever, animated stories. Some zesty anecdotes . A couple of quips, a few dark responses. MyfriendClaudiatextedme:“Becausemymother-in-law’svisiting .” She doesn’t have a mother-in-law. But she knows mine. As it turned out, the question wasn’t so simple. “I drank for different reasons at different points in life. All congruent to Erikson’s psychosocial stages of development,” my friend Annie, a reflective therapist, wrote from her Blackberry. One Not-So-Simple Question t 179 I raised my eyebrows. The eight stages include hope, will, purpose , and love—all issues that could drive a person to drink. Uh-oh, I thought. This isn’t the stuff of swizzle sticks and pint glasses. “To make it through stressful family holidays, dull anxiety, and because I can,” wrote Michele, who is, by her own definition , an “annoyed suburban mom and former party girl.” To be honest, I’ve never given much thought to why I drink. Certainly because it’s social, and I like the fuzzy hum at the end of the day provided by a gimlet or a glass of wine. A mojito or a beer. Because in high school, peppermint schnapps made our cheap pot taste like Doublemint gum. It made mistakes feel like good choices, even back then. Alcohol is a flexible substance; it provides many things for many people. My friend Louise, who is a funny, zany, hip young grandmother, wrote: “Alcohol is the most effective agent in calming my restless soul. But as I look back over decades of this behavior and assess the timing, I recognize another reason I drink. To drown my sorrows.” My foolishness was in thinking the replies I’d get to my question would be quick and glib because my friends and I tend to be quick and glib. But most of us have a complex relationship to alcohol . It feels good (until it feels bad), and many of us have alcoholics in our lives. We don’t want our kids to drink until they can make responsible decisions. So it’s a risk to write an essay about embracing the social, enjoyable, nonmoralistic side of drinking. But that’s part of drinking, too: it’s fun. As the replies to my not-so-simple query rolled in, I kept hearing : “Good question. I never thought about it, I just do it.” An unanticipated level of thoughtlessness in a bunch of women, all college educated, a few with PhDs, who haven’t done much without conscious thought in twenty years. But maybe that’s also the joy of drinking for those of us who can actually do it “casually.” There is so little we do without thinking these days. We perform our jobs thoughtfully; we listen 180 t b e t h j o n e s to our partners patiently (generally); we give our kids the attention they need. We move through our lives sensibly. As a result, I feel a little guilty making my friends reflect on one of the few things they do with little consideration as to why. I fear my question made them overanalyze something they don’t really ever think about. For...