Alcohol has a way of lowering people’s inhibitions and making them say or do things they’d usually keep in check. But when those moments end up hurting someone else, is it the drink to blame—or the person who chose to keep drinking?
One woman agreed to be the designated driver for her boyfriend and his friends during their night out. She didn’t mind at all—until she arrived to pick them up and her boyfriend started acting like a complete jerk. Hurt and uncomfortable, she quietly went home, leaving the group without a ride.
Once the guys realized what happened, a messy drama followed. Read the full story below.
The woman agreed to be the designated driver for her boyfriend and his friends on their night out
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But when she showed up to pick them up, her boyfriend started acting like a jerk—so she left them stranded
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In a follow-up, the author answered a few questions and clarified more details about the situation
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Alcohol can do a lot to a person, from lowering inhibitions and making them more impulsive, to clouding judgment and playing tricks on memory
Spend enough time at a bar and you will notice that alcohol does not do the same thing to everyone. Some people get looser, funnier, more willing to dance badly and laugh loudly. Others get flirtatious, their usual guard dropping with every round. And then there are those who get more withdrawn, almost melancholy. And others still who, somewhere around their fourth or fifth drink, start looking for an argument.
Part of that comes down to what is actually in the glass. A 2017 study published in BMJ Open found that different types of alcohol tend to pull people in different emotional directions. Beer and wine drinkers were more likely to feel relaxed, while those on spirits were significantly more likely to report feeling energized and confident but also restless, aggressive and tearful.
Whatever the drink though, the effects of alcohol on the brain tend to follow a pretty familiar pattern. According to rehabilitation clinic Ocean Recovery, alcohol lowers inhibitions, which is how things that would normally stay private end up being said out loud. It also makes people more impulsive and clouds judgment, making choices in the moment feel far more reasonable than they will seem in the morning.
And once that filter is gone, mood swings can come out of nowhere, turning someone warm and relaxed into someone irritable and confrontational within the space of an hour. Add in the way alcohol can interfere with memory, and it’s no surprise some people genuinely can’t account for parts of a night by the time they wake up.
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But does that mean alcohol is really to blame when things go wrong?
Given all of that, it kind of makes sense that people believe alcohol strips away any real control over what they say or do. If it impacts the brain that much, it almost seems logical. The boyfriend in this story certainly seemed to believe he had done nothing wrong, insisting he had no memory of getting handsy with his girlfriend or saying anything hurtful. Maybe the alcohol really was to blame. But research tells a rather different story.
According to experts, alcohol does not actually make people unaware of what they are doing in the way most people assume. Dr. Bruce Bartholow of the University of Missouri studied how the brain handles mistakes and awareness under the influence of alcohol, and what he found is pretty telling.
People who are drunk still register when they are crossing a line. The awareness does not vanish. What changes is how much they care about it. As Bartholow told NBC News, intoxicated people “seem to be less bothered by the implications or consequences of their behavior than they normally would be.”
And it may go even deeper than that. Social anthropologist Kate Fox argues that the way people act while drunk often has less to do with alcohol itself and more to do with cultural conditioning. Writing for the BBC, she points to the fact that in countries like the UK, the US and Australia, where alcohol is widely believed to make people aggressive and disinhibited, that is exactly how people tend to behave when they drink.
But in Mediterranean cultures, where alcohol is treated as an unremarkable part of everyday life, people simply do not act that way, because the expectation is not there. Controlled experiments even showed that people given non-alcoholic drinks, who only believed they had been drinking, started behaving in all the ways they expected alcohol to make them behave.
What the woman in this story went through was painful, and made all the more so by the fact that it came from someone she trusted and built a life with. But if research tells us anything, it is that the alcohol was not really the culprit here. It may have loosened his tongue and dulled whatever guilt he might have otherwise felt, but the words themselves? Those came from somewhere else entirely.
Plenty of commenters said her response made sense given what happened
But some felt it was a drunken moment she could’ve handled differently
Not long after, the author came back with an update
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Readers were glad she chose to walk away
