Love On the Rocks

How to drink from the heart.

By Iris Eisenman

Illustration by Justin Chen

In anticipation of a date, I watched my friend, who never smokes, tuck a cigarette into her purse. When I asked her why, she told me it was her first date routine. Something about the small ritual gave her a comfortable distance from the moment, like someone else was experiencing the night in her stead. I immediately recognized her desire for a switch to be flipped, for romance to exist in a compartmentalized register. This situational smoking was foreign to me, but I was far more familiar with another substance as a social and romantic lubricant: alcohol.

Even for those uninterested in drinking during high school, drugs and alcohol quickly become an unavoidable and highly encouraged part of college socialization. My own exploration at Barnard acquainted me with those altered states and their alter egos. My close friends have attested to the entertainment value of my intoxicated self. “Drunk Iris,” they’ve labeled, is looser with the tongue. Drunk Iris is quick-witted. Drunk Iris loves to dance. It was easy to like that charismatic, uninhibited posture that went along with the right amount of liquor. Drunken nights were easier, blurrier and, in many instances, more romantic. A side effect of my drinking was an ease of flirting that opened up new possibilities and dampened the awkward earnestness of expressing interest in somebody; a romantic encounter could simply fall into place. Success quickly encouraged a pattern, replicating a recipe for immediate, reciprocated attention and attraction.

A friend and I recently discussed their feeling of being socially inept while sober after enough of these positive intoxicated experiences. The enjoyment of an uninhibited self had approached a reliance on alcohol in order to feel their best in social settings. The thought had occurred to me, too, the possibility that I could only find love—or, at least, sex—while a little tipsy. I was not the only one with drinking habits linked to a desire to comfortably meet new people. We shared a sense that developing relationships benefited from light intoxication.

However, in recent months, my feelings on what it means to mix substances and relationships have evolved. My drinking as a social boon is no more common than the same habits leading to uncomfortable situations. I have been thinking more about the image of the long-time circulating archetype of the “drunk college girl.” Mocked to the point of vilification, these are the sloppy, wasted, promiscuous, self-endangering women stumbling down the streets of our social imagination. I, too, have been the girl who got too drunk and made a fool of herself. Last fall, I was briefly hospitalized with acute intoxication. I refer to it as my alcohol poisoning now, because my state surpassed the normal hallmarks of drinking. Or more accurately, what my friends informed me about my state. Not only had I woken up in a hospital bed at five in the morning, still drunk, but I had lost seven hours of my memory. By my friends’ descriptions, those seven hours were at times terrifying. I was hyperactive, throwing up, and acting aggressively. Worst of all, they told me with some hesitation that I had made one friend attempting to help me particularly uncomfortable, crossing their physical boundaries. Sober, my behavior would have been completely unforgivable. Nevertheless, they were exceedingly understanding in its aftermath. That night, I drank enough that my friends met a version of me that neither they nor I recognized. I see that I struck fear and discomfort into the hearts of everyone who took care of me in those lost hours. 

Not long after returning to campus, I experienced my own boundaries being violated by a drunk friend, albeit in a much smaller way. In their heavily intoxicated state, they lacked the capacity to fully respect me or see me through the haze. I sat in the moments after with a pit in my stomach. This transgression was forgiven, too, by me this time. I am grateful to say that my relationships have healed and flourished in the wake of all of these errors. Since then, I have ruminated on all the drunken violations that remain unforgiven, unspoken, or even unknown.

I recently stumbled upon a Tumblr textpost that read out: “@orienta1sm: do not delude yourself into thinking you are a kind person. no such thing exists…kindness is something you must practice and put effort into as long as you are alive.” Thinking of this need for avoiding passivity in my own moral self-conception, I see the converse condition is our universal capacity to enact harm. It is easy to say you would “never do that,” whatever the abuse or transgression may be. It is harder to be accountable to every version of yourself when they include one who might hurt someone. When inhibitions fall away and we choose to let cognition take a backseat, even just for a night, it becomes far easier not only to be harmed but to harm others. Flagrant abuse and misconduct when drunk are understood as things to be avoided, but I feel there is a slower, quieter danger in the accumulation of small violations of ourselves and others. Here, danger and distrust grow at a rate often imperceptible, amounting to maybe nothing more than a sick feeling at the end of the night that we just chalk up to an impending hangover.

Many people experiment with alcohol in college. I have begun experimenting with both sobriety at parties and harnessing the social boons of a buzz without feeling out of control. I am still learning how to toe the line between Drunk Iris and that undesired “drunk college girl” Iris. Breaking the automatic association between parties and alcohol takes work. This effort leads me to sometimes occupy frustrating social positions, such as being the only sober person in a room. But at the front of my mind, my new desire is to never go too far again. “One who respects others” is not a state of being, but a practice, sober or not. In friendship or in love, I want to speak without needing a crutch. I want to love with intention. I want to be able to live with every version of myself in harmony. It seems not too much to demand of myself.