Dry January, or Dry Hump January?

The Relationship Between Love and Alcohol: It's Complicated

Don’t get me wrong - I love AA. Some of my favorite people are alive and singing (often literally) because of Alcoholics Anonymous. But I have to tell you, the rooms of AA (and CA, and NA) are a toxic waste pit of untreated love addiction.

This, I always felt, is because drug and alcohol dependence are often a symptom (and result) of an underlying love addiction. People ease the pain of their love addiction with drugs and alcohol —because despite what the rom-coms and love songs about hopeless romantics tell you, love addiction hurts — and a certain percentage of them end up hooked. That just how drugs and alcohol work. Genetics + environment x substance = oh-oh. You drink, you have about a 10% chance of ending up alcoholic. About 20% of people who snort cocaine end up coke addicts, more if they smoke it. Heroin, you’re looking at 30%. Eventually, with luck, a lot those people end up clean and sober in 12-step groups. But they’re still love addicts. Making the rooms where they meet a toxic waste pit of sex and love addiction.

FYI, the most addictive substance out there is nicotine; almost 90% of people who use nicotine become addicted to it. And sure, some people pick up a cigarette to look attractive to a crush, or smoke one to soothe themselves when said attraction wasn’t returned. Maybe they chainsmoke when waiting for a call or a text that isn’t coming fast enough, or isn’t coming at all. So while the rooms of Nicotine Anonymous aren’t the same level swamp of active love addiction, they are also full of people dying for something pleasurable to do with their hands and their mouths that doesn’t involve a smoke. So it is fertile ground for sex addiction, considering that 6-8% of people who have sex end up as sex addicts.

But I just heard a conversation with historian Dr. Edward Slingerland, an expert on humanity’s relationship with alcohol, and now I wonder if there isn’t an even deeper level to the relationship between alcohol and love addiction.

I was listening to the latest OFFLINE podcast from Jon Favreau (not The Mandelorian Jon Favreau; the Pod Save America Jon Favreau ), a weekly look at how the internet is breaking our brains. This episode was about Dry January, California Sober, Sober Curious, and other ways young people are lately turning away from alcohol. It’s a trend: 41% of Americans ages 18-35 don’t drink, a huge change from a generation earlier. Some of them use cannabis or other recreational drugs, but they don’t drink. And this does have an interesting, if circuitous, link to our use of the internet. It also has an interesting link to love addiction.

In his book Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilisation, Dr. Slingerland argues that alcohol helped create modern civilization by allowing normally hostile groups of primates to dull their senses — especially their sense of danger — long enough to form a connection with someone outside their small tribe. It’s no coincidence that business deals are conducted over cocktails. Alcohol disconnects the pre-frontal cortex — the analytical, decision-making part of the brain — just long enough for us to bond.

We know that alcohol is a social lubricant. Dr. Slingerland contends that without the lubricant, there would be no social. Humans started farming to make beer, not bread. Offline’s interest here was the social media piece of social: Is connecting via the internet making it less useful, even less enjoyable, to drink? Is there a connection between Sober Curious and Zoom?

My interest here is more carnal. Of course alcohol makes it easier to get someone into bed, disconnecting the executive function and lowering the defenses. But it also helps people fall in love. It lets people get more transparent, honest and intimate. You know, that whole in vino veritas thing. So… yay, alcohol? Unless, of course, you’re an alcoholic. Or a love addict. We are already disconnecting our pre-frontal cortices at an alarming rate, or we wouldn’t be driving by our exes’ houses quite so often. Or ignoring all those red flags that got us into bed with them in the first place.

I don’t need alcohol to dull my sense of danger. All it takes is a decent pair of cheekbones and a dimple. And getting clean and sober didn’t make me less likely to fall in love - if anything, it made me more likely. I was thirstier, in all senses of the word. I’m not alone in that; note the previously mentioned toxic waste pit of sex and love addiction that is AA. This seems contradictory to Dr. Slingerland’s premise.

But still, I find the whole topic fascinating (I am a huge science nerd, as you know) and look forward to more research on the subject. Drunk posits that using alcohol must favor species survival, or a taste for it would have evolved out of the population millennia ago. But addicts and alcoholics - what kind of weird evolutionary detour are we? Why are we still here?

I’m not sure if or how any of this helps any of us recover from our own personal hell of love or sex addiction. The recipe there, near as I can tell, remains the same. Don’t call people who don’t want to hear from you. Don’t have sex with anyone you wouldn’t have lunch with. Don’t do anything behind someone’s back you wouldn’t do in front of their face. Live in the present, not the what-if past or the if-only future. Same old, same old.

But it’s interesting stuff, yes? Maybe not grist for the spank-bank, but food for thought.