ROSIE GREEN: Beware the glass-permanently-full types

Booze? Yes, I’m fully aware it ages my body on fast forward and an excess of it always precipitates a social hand-grenade moment – but, boy, does that first G&T feel good. And the prospect of a hard winter ahead means I won’t be decreasing my units any time soon. 

But the older I get the more I see the effect drinking has on relationships – both my own and others’. A 2013 study found alcohol was a factor in 60 per cent of separating couples – 60 per cent! Among my own friends it is increasingly becoming a point of conflict rather than just a laugh. 

Back in my youth, excess was the norm. At university I’d regularly imbibe all my allotted weekly units in one night. We would have prinks (pre-drinks) to avoid the relatively extortionate costs of buying them at the Student Union. And the night would often end with one of us in the bathroom praying to the porcelain god. 

Rosie Green (pictured) discusses the effects of alcohol this week. She says that the older she gets the more she witnesses how booze impacts our relationships

Even as we entered the world of work we didn’t dial down our booze consumption much. At the glossy magazine where I worked, there were endless parties with free-flowing drinks. The morning after a night of excess we would regularly take it in turns to have a restorative nap in the fashion cupboard. Twenty minutes lying on a Max Mara coat with a Prada bag for a cushion made the day survivable. 

It didn’t impact on my relationship because my boyfriend was doing the same thing (drinking lots, not sleeping on designer coats) and other than work we had minimal responsibilities. Then the kids came along. My friends and I agreed that it suddenly wasn’t very funny when your partner was so hungover that he or she was useless the next day. Not taking their turn to watch Teletubbies at 6am or passing on the 8.45am park trip all built resentment. After having kids I found myself slipping into the role of the fun police – begging my ex-husband not to stay out too long or to imbibe too much. 

Overbearing or fair? 

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I once poured wine into a measuring jug to prove he was underestimating his unit consumption. I got more and more frustrated that on a night out he couldn’t just have two drinks then extract himself and come home. Why the need to go on to three or four or five? It became a bone of contention. 

I was reminded of this when I heard Adrian Chiles on the radio talking about this same thing. He has written a book about it called The Good Drinker. Having drunk a lot in his lifetime – up to 100 units a week – he says that he only really enjoyed 30 per cent of them: ‘I’m sure I could have had just as great a time while drinking an awful lot less.’ 

‘Yes, yes!’ I shouted at the radio. 

When I started dating I barely gave a thought to a prospective beau’s drinking style. But when dating progressed to ‘seeing someone’ it slowly emerged, after a few months, whether a man had an unhealthy relationship with booze. 

One guy I was going out with polished off most of a bottle of whisky in a single night and rendered himself incapacitated the next day. He had been home alone at the time. 

That was a red flag. A green flag is if someone is nice when tipsy. Alcohol makes my boyfriend affectionate rather than argumentative, which gets a big tick. When I think back to the start of our relationship, it was a boozy boys’ night out and the subsequent flurry of texts he sent in the cab home that meant I knew he liked me – inhibitions down, no playing it cool. 

He woke up with hangxiety, I woke up with a smile on my face. 

But in conclusion, I think the key to a happy partnership is to be on roughly the same page when it comes to alcohol consumption. You could be a pair of high-functioning alcoholics or an-only-drink-at-Christmas couple and it can work. But if one of you is a hard drinker and the other a teetotaller it’s got to create conflict. 

As for me and the boyfriend? Well, I’ve lightened up. These days the measuring jug is only used for microwaving peas.