The Dates of Wrath

I've only had a few ales

“My name is Air, and I have been a drunk dater.”

Here is my full admission. Drunk dating is where the sensible limits of daytime decorum are breached, and – generally by unspoken mutual agreement – you and your date both launch yourselves into the wild unknown of untrammelled cocktail abuse, and hang the consequences.

Now don’t get me wrong: note the emphasis on a mutual experience. This is a wobbly dance for two.

I’m not the sweating, red-faced dude who’s downed a healthy glass of wine before leaving the house and sluiced three pints by the time you arrive, just as a pre-cocktail apéritif. The scent you catch from my neck is Creed Vetiver, not the tangy aroma of Bombay Sapphire. It generally takes no longer than a second for my eyes to converge in unison on your face.

My problem is that I’m a fast drinker, and I’m used to carousing with slow drinkers. My pacing is normally taken care of by watching the glass opposite and matching that. As a native Brit I’m quite capable of sucking down as many beverages as anyone else and still remembering what colour the 123 subway is (even if I can’t focus on the white squiggles). Reasonable level of alcobuzz, no embarrassment, job done.

The last couple of weeks have been problematic therefore as I’ve been matched with extremely irresponsible drinkers of Eastern European descent. Who would have thought that second-generation Ukrainian- and/or Polish-Americans would have been brought up on a liquid diet of neat vodka? My liver and professional To Do list are now painfully aware of that combination.

First was Bertha, who spoke and drank fluent Polish. We sat on a quiet night at Larry Lawrence and steadily got absolutely steaming. Without any real discussion about it; just a sly not-looking-at-the-time and lots of well-why-not eyebrow raising. Before you know it we’re waving goodbye to a battery of empty glasses and shuffling outside into the snow for some extremely enthusiastic but totally inaccurate fumbling through heavy coats. I distinctly remember thinking to myself, my brain has actually stopped working.

Following not long after was Celia, keeping it real for the Ukrainians and not calling into question their reputation for making ethanol disappear faster than Usain Bolt surfing a cheetah. I arrived at Angel’s Share to find she was two drinks ahead of me (one of them a Guinness, which should tell you something). After conjuring away several cocktails in embarrassingly short order it was off to Pete’s Tavern for pints and – WTF was happening – car bombs. On date one. Again inevitably there was some serious street-necking at the end of the night, some of the details of which escape me.

It’s no doubt true that some level of machismo came into it. Some stupid fear of being out-drunk, along the lines of, ‘even though you have the day off tomorrow to recover, I’m not going to be rendered a quivering alco-pussy here, another round!‘

Once the effects wore off though – and by god there were painful and debilitating effects the next day – it became clear this kind of nonsense is not sustainable. Let’s break down what it means so can make your decisions clearly.

Risks

Be prepared for:

• Poor decision making. You may well get yourself tangled with someone who is considerably less hawt when the beer goggles are off.
• You will have a terrible first kiss. Only if you are lucky (or unlucky, depending) will you remember it at all.
• Fuzzy McMemoryTheft will visit you in the night. All that careful work establishing what kind of human they are will be flushed away in the surge of synthesized formaldehyde through your brain.

Rewards

It’s not all grim! No one’s suggesting you have to live like Bukowski, it was just a night out.

• There’s a whole level of bonding over the OMG-we-got-crazy hedonistic romance of it all.
• Extra bonding over the trauma afterwards. The shared pain is a struggle you’ve both survived.
• Goodbye inhibitions! Whatever level of physical intimacy is appropriate for your date is going to be boosted by two or three dates. There will be pawing.

Drink safe, but more importantly drink sexy.