All of us Ladies came together as friends while we were single and searching for similar things. We all have a similar lifestyle - one that involves lots of happy hours, wine nights, travel, festivals - you name it. We have a ton of fun together, and much of that fun involves drinking.
Throughout my 30s, I've observed that many people who are still single (or divorced) share this lifestyle. After all, given the choice to sit at a home with a Netflix marathon or to go have cocktails with my girls on a patio in RVA, I'm going to take the latter option 95% of the time. As someone who lives alone, the Netflix marathon represents boredom and isolation, while meeting up with friends equals connection and good times. However, the regular presence of alcohol has sometimes been problematic for all of us Ladies, both personally and with men we've tried to date.
Perhaps you've encountered the Perpetual Bachelor who still reserves Friday nights for trolling nightclubs with his boys, looking for scantily clad, tipsy 20-somethings to hook up with. We've encountered quite a few of these playboys on Match, and while they may be willing to take you out to dinner on Wednesday night, come Friday you're going to find out that their usual plans are more important than you. We've also found this pattern with Adult Jocks--guys who still religiously play rec sports (or just fantasy football) and are absolutely not going to give up having beers with the guys afterwards to hang out with you.
On the other hand, women will often break plans with their girlfriends in order to hang out with a guy. Whether you judge this or support your friends' desire to find love, women typically won't pass up hanging out with a dude to go drinking with the girls. However, women do lots of other self-destructive things after a few too many: drunk texting, unplanned hookups, less than intelligent responses to messages from guys... you know what we're talking about. It's not that you'd purposely act this way in front of your new beau--it's that you get sloshed and forget that he wouldn't find that behavior cute.
So, how can you still have fun without sabotaging your relationships? Our recommendations:
1) Millionaire Matchmaker Patti Stanger famously counsels her clients to stick to a two drink maximum on dates. This is excellent advice. First (or second) dates are not the time to get tanked--unless the date is so bad that you want to forget it ever happened.
2) If you're in for a long drinking session, turn your cell phone over to your friends. The Ladies regularly repossess each others' cell phones when it looks like a bad decision is about to go down.
3) Don't invite a new guy out to a drunk fest with your friends, and don't chat with him while you're there. If you're doing Sunday Funday while he watches football with the guys, leave him alone until you're sober.
4) Regularly evaluate your priorities. The beauty of being single is having the freedom to do whatever you want with your time. However, if you book up every moment of your time with "fun" to make sure that you're never bored, when the right guy comes along, there won't be any space for him in your life.
5) Listen when a guy talks to you about his life. Does he get drunk every weekend with his friends? Does he down 8 beers on your first date? If you can't have a good time with a guy when you're both sober, he's not the one for you - period.
We get it. Drinking is fun. Being single is fun. But while you're single, don't get into such a pattern of having *fun* that once someone good comes along, you ruin it by being a sloppy mess.
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