After you get sober, every social thing you do has to be customized for the clear eyes and nervous hands; your voice is a little too loud in your ears or too soft so that suddenly no one can hear you. You – the booming voice of the party! Imagine.

Dating is possibly the most challenging activity. Dinner parties are another. Making late-night phone calls is a drag, and dancing… forget dancing for a little while. Your arms and legs will spasm uncontrollably the precise moment you tell your brain to relax, stay cool.

            Joe Berkovitz writes about his awkward dating forays into the dating world sans alcohol in The hardest part about quitting drinking? Dating. He talks about the badly timed jokes, silences, the growing gap between the non-drinker and the drinker as the night progresses, the inability to take things to the next level.

Dating sober is painful. My first date sober was excruciating. It was with my ex. We broke up over my drinking. On our date, I had a hard time looking him in the eye. I drank lots of cranberry and soda because it was kind of red, and red was kind of like wine. He made jokes about the sign across the street that said 3-for-1 Ginos Pizza, no apostrophe, how you could get three Ginos for the price of one?... I laughed but inside I was dying. Could he not see I was made out of pulsing nerves and that was all? I wanted to run home and hide and never ever have to speak to any man ever again.

We took weeks to re-learn each other. He had never known me sober and I didn’t know myself this way either. We were fortunate that there was familiarity between us that allowed for certain awkwardness that happens in early dating to be eliminated naturally. It is possibly why we’ve survived the first few months of me sober.

But I watched some friends get sober and not be able to date again, just like Berkovitz. I know many gorgeous, brilliant women who were unable to date for the first few years of not drinking. A sober man I know has flings with drunk women – never relationships – because he’s unable to talk to them. He sees them as asses, boobs, parts and it’s easier that way for him. He has dumped a girl because, he said, her chin jutted out too far. Yes, he’s an asshole but he’s also a terrified one because it is terrifying to be sober in the drunk world of dating. This is why many people get together within the sphere of their addiction meetings because of that common plight, the awkward hands that are mirrored so it’s not as lonely to be the only sober one.  

As I got more sober, there were more challenges that I had to go through, besides getting back together with my ex. There was public speaking: Made me want to run straight into traffic. There was dancing: My formerly liquid limbs froze so spectacularly that once I thawed a bit I was suddenly knocking knees and having a semi-epileptic fit. Before, I was known as a fantastic dancer. When the phone would ring, it was more alarming than an ambulance siren and was just as unwelcome. Till this day, actually, I have a hard time picking up the phone. Drunk, you couldn’t get me to get off of it.

Once you stop drinking you have to teach your body and your mind how to navigate in this world again. Like Berkovitz talks about in his article, people are not as interesting when you’re sober. Actually, they may be just as interesting but a newly sober mind still isn’t trained to deal with relating to people straight on. You were drunk when the world challenged you. Now, there’s nowhere to hide, suddenly, no sips to take when the joke falls flat.

I know someone who’s early in sobriety and he’s spent the first month and a half of it home. It’s safer to be home. I did that too. I stayed home a lot in the first months and years of sobriety. I missed the bar so I asked people who drank about the bar and that was good enough for a while. I tried going to the bar sober but have you ever been to the bar sober? Seriously. There’s nothing more boring. And stressful. It’s a little like going on the rollercoaster one too many times. You want to get off, you are kind of scared but, hey, you know that this is known as fun, so have fun, damnit.

            But as the months pass you realize that you have been re-learning the world and that – like with any practice – you’re starting to get better at it. This is what I would say to anyone in early sobriety – it will get easier. Simply because your mind and your body will figure out how to map out its sober surroundings, and you’ll find your own place again. Even the confidence will come back to you. Your dating bravado will come back too – it may be more subtle, and the pain of rejection will be there to be felt, but you’ll try again because you are the brave one. When you kiss, your teeth will clink with the other person’s teeth but there will be a time when you will laugh about it instead of hating yourself for not being like the people in the movies kissing one another with their supple faces. And speaking of supple, you limbs will relax and you will suddenly really hear the music and really feel the beat and you will dance just because it’s always been in you, the dancing. Or you’ll find that you’re actually more on the quiet side anyway and that you were never a dancer, a pushy dater or the booming voice of the party in the first place. It was all an illusion.