Never Pretend To Drink Alcohol If You Don’t Drink

We need to normalize NOT drinking, not try to blend in with the crowd and encourage a damaging cultural norm.

Photo by Paige Ledford in Unsplash

I genuinely feel bad for people who don’t drink and feel the need to pretend to drink alcohol in social situations to feel normal. It’s not even their fault because if they were met with a different reality of a culture not totally obsessed with getting wasted, they wouldn’t pretend to enjoy it too.

But if we can change our attitudes and the conversation around alcohol, hopefully one day nobody will ever feel like they need to drink to fit in and drinking will be seen as an undesirable human trait.

Drinking isn’t even cool anymore.

Interestingly enough, I heard a study on the radio the other day that said people prefer to date someone that doesn’t drink — that non-drinking is actually an attractive quality. What are we missing here? I never realized that.

Since I stopped drinking, I thought it’d be harder for me to find someone to date because in my world, everybody drinks and nobody wants to be with someone who is going to be a downer or a party pooper.

That’s how I thought when I was drinking: I needed someone on my level, and now that I’m sober of course I want to be with another sober person.

I have quickly learned that not everybody actually drinks and yet I still have this feeling it’s harder to find friends or partners that are sober than not…

Because drinking IS super normalized, and just a quick Google search shows how many people are asking “how to pretend to drink alcohol around friends.”

Why? Personally, I never had to pretend to drink alcohol because I was always drinking and I always truly wanted to. I didn’t have to try to look cool; I was cool, or so I thought.

Now I think being sober is cooler, and I hope the rest of the world catches up in agreement one day.

I don’t want to see people afraid of not fitting in, looking weird or being the odd one out, or peer pressured into “drinking” when they really don’t feel like it. I think if you can say no to a drink, you’re a strong person, even if…