Back in her single days, writer Zara Barrie almost always threw back what she called a \u201cpersonality drink\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cDrinking gives me a false sense of connection with a person,\u201d Barie told HuffPost. \u201cIf I\u2019ve had two glasses of Champagne I can feel chemistry with anyone.\u201d <\/p>\n
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 fianc\u00e9e, a woman Barrie loves \u201cwithout any Champagne goggles\u201d on. <\/p>\n
\u201cLooking back, I realize that I drank so damn much in my early 20s because I was hanging out with people I didn\u2019t have anything in common with. Booze masked that ugly reality,\u201d she said. \u201cI told myself I needed a drink for so long that I believed it with every fiber of my being.\u201d<\/p>\n
Barrie\u2019s story probably sounds all too familiar if you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s particularly motivating for women who pregame, said Patricia O\u2019Gorman, a New York City-based psychologist and the author of The Girly Thoughts 10-Day Detox Plan: The Resilient Woman\u2019s Guide To Saying \u2018No\u2019 To Negative Self-Talk And \u2018Yes\u2019 To Personal Power.<\/p>\n
\u201cWomen internalize society standards of perfection and then berate themselves if they do not fulfill them,\u201d O\u2019Gorman said. \u201cWith 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
The problem? The line between \u201ccool girl who can handle her liquor\u201d 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. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Back in her single days, writer Zara Barrie almost always threw back what she called a \u201cpersonality drink\u201d 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. \u201cDrinking gives me a false sense … Continue reading “Modern Dating Is Making Us Drink More. That\u2019s Making Us Less Successful At It.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":255,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[69],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-life","tag-drinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/demo\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/demo\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/demo\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/demo\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/demo\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/demo\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":256,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/demo\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions\/256"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/demo\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/demo\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/demo\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ampforwp.com\/demo\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}