Why, why, why?

Since we skipped our morning running alarm two days in a row now, I must perform penance with a long promised blog post.

Since meeting three months ago, Amanda and I have moved into a new apartment together, went to Vietnam for a week, and quit drinking alcohol. The first two initiatives are the result of serendipity and the nature of a whirlwind courtship between two people with underdeveloped emotional walls. The third initiative was taken, not as much by us but by our relationship. Our relationship needed us to quit drinking because if we didn’t it wasn’t going to survive.
It’s a pretty big step when you forsake what has been the only social activity you’ve known for the last six years. If you had asked me three months ago, “How many nights a week would you like to drink three or more beers?”, I would have answered, “Four.” To be fair, my answer would still be four, I’m just not going to follow through. I was dependent on alcohol for any and all social activity. Playing guitar with friends? That’s five beers. Going out to eat? A pint and a bottle of soju. A night out? Depends on when it ends, but tomorrow it’s not going to be pretty. Is that a problem? Not necessarily. Youth absolves one from his responsibility to his body and reason for a time, but as we cross the quarter-life threshold that time appears on the horizon. Cultivating a healthy relationship with alcohol to combat abuse and foster reasonable usage habits is an intelligent endeavor at this point in life. I’m also treating living without alcohol as a social experiment; I must rediscover what people do without alcohol on a day to day basis, and a test of my own will-power. So far I haven’t broken my promise, but the force of the temptation has proven two things, how flimsy my will is and how strong the pull of alcohol is.

I consider my reasons for teetotaling somewhat superficial. I may have an unhealthy approach to drinking, but it hasn’t substantially negatively affected my life. I can drink without getting plastered, although I usually want to keep drinking if I can. I can go long periods without alcohol if I have to. Alcohol does not change my pattern of behavior; I don’t become another person when I drink, I become me but more fun and extroverted. I don’t consider myself addicted. Amanda’s reasons for forsaking the booze are somewhat more substantial. I won’t go into it, but Amanda’s life has been objectively more difficult than mine. Stability was not the name of the game in Oregon as it was in Pennsylvania. There’s family history, a personal past we won’t go into here, a complete inability to self-moderate, and a tendency to slip into an almost unrecognizable personality when inebriated that contribute to Amanda’s decision to do without alcohol. While I view our sobriety as a matter of curiosity and experimentalism, she views it as a matter of necessity. She took the lead in recognizing the pattern of behavior that needs to stop, and while I can see parallels in my own life, I don’t have the experiences and family history that would independently cause me to decide to quit alcohol. I am grateful, in that sense, to be spared what is inevitably to come, and I am also grateful to be able to help someone I deeply care about change her life in the way she knows she has to.

After our last drunken night, surviving another booze-fueled fight, we woke up suddenly only hours after our heads hit the pillow and walked like zombies up the main road to the KimBapNara where we recognized that in order for our relationship to survive, our dependence on alcohol needed to die. Teary, she told me over kimchi that she wanted to stop, and despite my misgivings (the irresistible pull of alcohol, and the fact that I hadn’t recognized my own problems fully), I said I would stop too. Even in its infancy we recognized that what we had between us was too important to lose to the same habits that had strained the strands of our previous relationships, it was time to change for ourselves, and for what we found in each other. I haven’t been sober for this long in 8 years; I’m not ecstatic about it, but I’m better for it.