for REAL LIFE
It isn’t easy going on dates at the best of times, but writer Kate Mulvey says they’re better when you’re sober – honestly...
Have you ever been on a sober date? I don’t mean one that starts with good intentions but ends with downing a bottle of Prosecco as the only way to get through an evening with a man who turns up late and is so boring you want to put the carrot sticks up your nose.
I mean one where you get to know the person sitting opposite, without the familiar alcohol buzz that makes the world seem floaty and fun.
After all, the first date is where we build a picture of the person. Are they funny, reserved? Are we into them, or are they into us? When we’re sober we can cut through the wine goggles and speed up the bonding process.
I know this because since I gave up drinking, I’ve found dry dating a revelation and the only way forward… It wasn’t always the case. Looking back, drinking seemed a fundamental part of the dating game. I remember getting ready, and feeling that sense of bubbly excitement as I downed my pre-date Vermouth.
I thought I was flirty and fun. But by the end of the night, I was often a sweaty mess of tangled hair, my mascara halfway down my cheeks, slumped in some after-hours dive that sold overpriced drinks.
It’s not as though I planned to get drunk. Like most people, having a tipple made me less self-conscious and calmed the nerves. The trouble is, after one glass, I always wanted another.
Take the good-looking doctor in Fulham I’d met at a friend’s party. At 32 he was a decade older than me. At first, we got on really well, sipping chilled white wine at a fancy restaurant in Chelsea. An hour later, my top was flung to the wind and I was insisting my date took me to his house...
At some point I even climbed into the skip outside and started dancing.
He managed to put me in his bed – to sleep. When I woke bleary eyed the next day, there was a pot of coffee and a note with the number of an AA centre.
Something I clearly didn’t take up, as there were many more drunken dates over the next few years including the one where I thought it was hilarious to flick bits of mashed potato at fellow diners in the restaurant. Then, oblivious to the shock on my date’s face, proceeded to plant a huge kiss on his lips and laugh.
By the time I was 27, I’d spent the last 10 years in a fug of alcohol and bad behaviour: gin and tonics until I passed out at my date’s house, the grovelling next-day apologies. ‘Yup sorry I ruined the evening by puking all over your new sofa. So long.’
I was at my lowest ebb. I knew if I didn’t tak
