I’m an alcoholic. When I quit drinking, my best friend abandoned me

When I see her name appear on my WhatsApp, I don’t even open the message. I archive it, to look at another time. In some ways, you could say she archived me fifteen years ago, that I was no longer urgent news to her. School friends since we were five, we did it all together in a series of thrilling firsts: first boyfriends, first cars, first dates. We were brand new even if we didn’t know it. There were other, toxic firsts: first cigarettes, first bottles of wine, first lines of coke, first pills. This was the noughties after all and ladette culture had coalesced into the “have-it-all, s**g-it-all, drink-it-all” culture. Somehow, feminism seemed to have become co-opted into excess. Viva Forever we sang, drunkenly. We believed it. Except there was one thing that we couldn’t do together: be abstinent. To my memory, we never did anything that didn’t involve drugs or alcohol. It just wasn’t how we operated. In our deeply confessional, faux-troubled way, we felt we were accessing the marrow of friendship exclusively when we were three bottles of wine down in an All Bar One. And then, aged 26, I stopped. (Photo: Tom Pllston).

Friendship grew dry

Although we both drank roughly the same amount, the consequences were dramatically different for each of us. Whereas she managed to get up, go to work and hold down a relationship with a boyfriend, I clearly could not. A hangover for me meant three days in bed ignoring all calls from HR, family or friends. Three days where I drank red wine out of a tooth mug and stubbed cigarette butts into an ashtray shaped as a heart that I had bought in Mallorca with her. “Your heart is full of ash,” she laughed when she came to rescue me from one of my downers. It was also full of fear. Soon after, I stumbled into my first AA meeting. I didn’t dare tell her where I was going. Astonishingly quickly, the lifeblood of our friendship whittled down to very little when I was only drinking a diet coke. Where were the deep confessional moments, where was the side-splitting laughter, where was the sacrifice of driving 20 miles to help me when I was hungover? The glass of friendship was dry. (Photo: Boris_Zec/Getty).

Feeling betrayed

I see now that my best friend was angry with me – I had betrayed our pact. When I told her I was one year sober, she poured a glass of wine in front of me and asked if it was forever. “You used to be so much fun”, was the lament over the years when I stood at weddings with a tonic water in my hand. Luckily, other friends thought I was much better company when I stopped getting wasted and bursting into tears. “I never really knew you liked to laugh” one university friend said when I had been two years sober, “you always looked so, sort of, sad”. Unsurprisingly, disrupting the friendship status quo in this country was never going to be unanimously approved of. Some friends regarded me with suspicion, some with derision; “we didn’t invite you because it was really boozy,” one said sheepishly while I nearly wept in front of her. Most, I am happy to report, regarded me with compassion and a healthy dollop of relief; “less of a loose cannon” seemed to be the consensus. (Photo: Getty).

The silent friend

Modern female friendship has always been cemented by alcohol. Take any number of pop culture depictions of women communing together and the silent, invisible friend is always booze. Sex and the City is the obvious example, as the narrative thrusts its way forward through scenes of the four protagonists in a cocktail bar; how can we know about Carrie’s true thoughts about Aidan, or about Miranda’s burgeoning homosexuality without the confessional wine scenes with the girls? Or take Meredith Grey and Cristina Yang in Grey’s Anatomy who bond more over tequila and dancing than dead cadavers. But if pop culture renders the relationship between alcohol and female friendship baldly and without tension – top her up with the lady petrol – real life suggests otherwise. Research to come out of the University of Southampton points to the “impossible dilemma” that modern women face around alcohol, one in which women strive to achieve a “hypersexual modern femininity” as part of the hedonist discourse of the late 90s and early aughts and the older feminist discourse of choice. As Sober October begins, many will be gaining new insight into how drinking shapes and drives their friendships. (Photo: Channel Four).

After-effects of alcohol on women

Put simply, you can frame women drinking together as a feminist choice, or you can see it as a means of keeping women in the clutches of dynamics that underwrite patriarchal structures of domesticity, secrecy and affect. Either way, the facts are these: women experience more harms from alcohol than men due to our genetic make-up and the tragic fact that between 2016 to 2021, the number of women who died from alcohol-related causes in the UK increased by 37 per cent, reaching the highest level since records began according to ONS data. Has female friendship with all its attendant marketing and cultural coercion by the drinks’ industry woken up to its biggest hangover? Female friendship may be bleary eyed, but friends are often the addict’s alka seltzer, the last lifeline after a series of warnings, says Professor Kai Pernanen who studies alcohol and human behaviour at the University of Uppsala, Sweden. “Some of the most effective interventions in alcohol abuse, such as those based on the philosophy of Alcoholics Anonymous, base their success on support from friends”. (Photo: Steve Prezant/Getty).

Commanding status and respect

But this helping hand – in the form of staged intervention, moral support, even foregoing drinking around the addict – comes with a caveat. Ironically, friends are often the reason we drink the way we do. “Friendships affect initiations to alcohol use and they also influence later drinking patterns and problems”, says Pernanen. Crucially, this mimetic process starts in adolescence since alcohol commands status and respect in the “central identity-forming milieu besides the family”. In short, drinking gets you into the cool club; but what happens when you want to leave? One recovering female addict I speak to describes the bonds of female friendship as “dark, not friendship as such, but drinkship” before adding: “we were in it together and despised other women who didn’t drink like us but when I stopped, I hardly saw those women anymore. I was branded a traitor, a sober bore. Now one of them is dead and the other is in a wheelchair. I’m so glad I stopped when I did.” (Photographer: Tom PIlston).

High expectations

Another woman in recovery describes her drinking friends turning away in a “kind of divorce” after she stopped drinking: “I just wish they could understand that I don’t care if they drink; but I can’t.” Undoubtedly, due to late-stage capitalism and third-wave feminism that is beginning to examine the way women are pitted against other women digitally, friendship has moved centre stage in our culture. Bestselling books such as Elizabeth Day’s Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict, speak to the high expectations we, as women, hold of this central relationship. But while men’s understanding of intimacy may be more rudimentary according to a survey by the Movember Foundation, women expect so much more. We expect reciprocity, or the feeling that we might see ourselves in another, but we also expect a great deal of vulnerability and self-disclosure. Is it any wonder that alcohol, that famous loosener of inhibitions and private passions, plays such a large part in this high-stakes game? (Photo: Connect Images/Getty).

Complications are revealed

I’m sitting in my car waiting for my children to finish school when I decide to open my archived messages. “I miss you” it reads, “shall we have a drink soon?”. I start typing immediately but something stops me, some internal red light flashes across my mind. Why? It’s not as if seeing her would make me want to drink and it’s true, I have often missed her too. But narrating the fifteen years of my life without alcohol simply feels too hard, too overdue, too complicated. I worry she will see me as sanctimonious or worse, brain-washed (a classic insult thrown at people in Twelve Step Fellowships). Some days later, I reply asking her for lunch at my house. She has never even met my children. She still hasn’t replied.

Motherhood created change

I have friends from all corners of my life, some from recovery, many from childhood, and, overwhelmingly, many that share the other great divide of female life: motherhood. And while motherhood and alcohol are woven together culturally in the “mummy wine time” trope that removes the shame of drinking from frazzled mothers, I have, contrarily, found this to be the most bonding experience of female friendship. Radicalised by the biological facts of childbirth and childrearing, for me, motherhood has been the great leveler, one that collapses the cultural walls around drinking. (Photo: miniseries/Getty).

Hope for the future

I met one of my best friends at Monkey Music eight years ago; to memory, I don’t think I have ever seen her drink, although I would be delighted if she wanted to. The young adult I was in the early nineties is a far remove from a young Gen Z woman now. Research from Drinks International shows that 21.5 per cent do not drink at all, with 39 per cent only drinking occasionally. It feels hard to imagine a coming of age that doesn’t need to co-opt alcohol into the process of maturation. I hope, for my daughters’ sake, that this is the case. A part of me can’t bear to live through it a second time. (Photo: Getty).