I’m teetotal and my annoying husband isn’t

Dear A&E,

I used to drink alcohol two or three nights a week, and my husband and I had a bottle of wine each on the weekend (we’ve been together seven years). We both did Dry January this year and I relished the feeling of clear-headedness and the increased energy levels, so I kept going. My husband went back to his normal routine. Now that I am not drinking, I realise that he’s a bit of an annoying drunk, and am now dreading being with him while he’s intoxicated on a chilly Friday night. What can I do? 

– Love, Teetotal

Dear Teetotal,

One of the hardest things about giving up drinking, even if you weren’t really a problem drinker leaving a car crash trail of disastrous relationships and gin-soaked disappointment behind you, is working out how to continue leading your life without it. From drunk today to sober tomorrow; the shape of your life hasn’t changed – but the leading lady has. Your friends haven’t necessarily sobered up. Your couple’s relaxation framework is still constructed around a bottle and a boxset on a Friday night. But here you are, bright-eyed and booze-free, fizzing with the zeal of the freshly-converted, energised with possibility (‘I might run a marathon, look at Spencer Matthews!’), while everyone else just ticks along unaware. 

For alcoholics, this issue of context is a minefield, full of deadly traps littered with the horrors of the past. For those – like you - who have merely found that not drinking makes them feel better, the stark realisation is that drunk people are a bit boring. Sorry. Every single person who has, for whatever reason, been to a party and stayed 100 per cent sober, knows that after a certain point in the evening the volume gets louder, the repetition more acute, the diction less so, and that probably no one will notice if you leave (even the person currently in the process of slurring your ear off). 

It is also very difficult to replicate that alcohol-infused energy and enthusiasm for things when you are on your third sparkling elderflower of the evening. Many are left with this quandary: “Do I slide off and tuck myself in at 9pm with the new Jackson Brodie novel? Or, do I power on, nodding along to the mumbling moonshiners in the hope that just sticking around will keep me emotionally connected to my friends and old life?”

Most non-drinkers work it out by choosing new places to meet their friends: parks not pubs, cake not clubs, you get the drift. But we can see, dear Teetotal, that it is going to be harder to shift the patterns with your husband. Careful not to let annoyance with his routine (which was also yours until five minutes ago) evolve towards “My husband is really annoying”. It is unfashionable to say this now, but it’s perfectly understandable that, after a long week, someone might sit down and make a hefty dent in a bottle of wine on a Friday night. Here’s the science bit: we all know that, medically, it’s not super advisable. 

We could suggest to you that you make alternative plans, organise a Friday yoga class now that you are positively gleaming with good health; encourage him to go out drinking with his friends rather than suck up sofa space; slink off to bed. And this is all absolutely fine, but it will also create distance and divide you, rather than replace the intimacy you have lost with your partner-in-wine. So perhaps we might suggest that, dear Teetotal, you need to add more to your life with your husband instead of taking away. Aim for abundance! Mini-breaks! Weekend walks! Give him his Friday night flop and then fill the rest of your free time together with fun and exploration. You could say to him something like, “My love, Friday nights on the sofa are great, and I know you are tired from work, but I want to see the world with you. What if we planned some new things to do on the weekends?”

By creating new backdrops – new scenery for the theatre of your relationship – you might discover a wealth of things to be thrilled about, together. And this may even nudge the Friday night routine towards something that irritates you less. But we would quickly add here, it’s probably wise not to fall into the common trap of obsessing about his drinking or obsessing about getting him to stop. That way madness lies. There are entire support networks dedicated to helping people lovingly detach themselves from their friends and family’s drinking. Instead, we would recommend trying to find a way to channel your newly found alcohol-free fervour into something nutritious for you. Gentle ways to mitigate the restlessness of Friday nights, and fill both your cups with novelty. The happy by-product could even be a greater sense of connection the rest of the time. Who knows… perhaps you’ll both be running a Marathon des Sables in a few years time?