The sun is out, the football is on, beer gardens are packed and sunset-pink shots of condensation-frosted palomas (the new negroni) are plastered across Instagram, but I bet someone in your life has given up drinking. Maybe more than one person. I know lots (if you count parasocial “knowing”, and I don’t get out much, so I do). Sobriety is everywhere; I downed two long reads on the subject just last week. Reporting spans personal reckonings, generational nuances and shifting advice (Ireland has adopted tobacco-style warnings on alcohol). Sobriety is chic, too: it made a list of “new status symbols” in Grazia (though so did orange wine; they contain multitudes).
Never an early adopter, I am finally experiencing sober curiosity. I don’t have a problematic relationship with alcohol: we are more than Facebook friends, but hardly Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. In my formative drinking years, I took antidepressants that made my hangovers so frighteningly dark I was turned off drinking for a decade. I enjoy a dirty martini or a margarita now (both vehicles for the one substance I really have a problem with: salt), but remain relatively take it or leave it. I’ll have a drink if I go out (so, almost never) and my husband and I have one most Friday and Saturday nights, but I don’t miss it when it doesn’t happen.
