Modern Dating Is Making Us Drink More. That’s Making Us Less Successful At It.

Back in her single days, writer Zara Barrie almost always threw back what she called a “personality drink” prior to a first date. Thanks to the drink or two, conversation on her dates flowed as freely as a just-opened bottle of pinot. But there was a clear downside, too.

“Drinking gives me a false sense of connection with a person,” Barie told HuffPost. “If I’ve had two glasses of Champagne I can feel chemistry with anyone.”

Barrie, a senior writer at Elite Daily, eventually gave sober dating a shot. It sharpened her dating spidey sense in pretty short order, and led to her meeting her fiancée, a woman Barrie loves “without any Champagne goggles” on.

“Looking back, I realize that I drank so damn much in my early 20s because I was hanging out with people I didn’t have anything in common with. Booze masked that ugly reality,” she said. “I told myself I needed a drink for so long that I believed it with every fiber of my being.”

Barrie’s story probably sounds all too familiar if you’re currently single. A 2014 survey from Plenty of Fish found that 36.4 percent of singles drink before going out, and 48.9 percent drink during the date, averaging two or three drinks during the course of an evening.

The same survey found that 19.1 percent of guys have gotten drunk on a first date, and so have 16.8 percent of women.

That’s particularly motivating for women who pregame, said Patricia O’Gorman, a New York City-based psychologist and the author of The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan: The Resilient Woman’s Guide To Saying ‘No’ To Negative Self-Talk And ‘Yes’ To Personal Power.

“Women internalize society standards of perfection and then berate themselves if they do not fulfill them,” O’Gorman said. “With dating, a woman often feels obligated to be more relaxed than she is, even more sexual than she feels comfortable with, and these pressures can encourage her to drink before a date to achieve this.”

The problem? The line between “cool girl who can handle her liquor” and slightly hot mess becomes more blurred the more dependent you become on drinking, said Caitlin Cecil, a wellness coach in Houston who has written about sober dating.