I'd never had sober sex until I quit alcohol in my 50s

Yahoo

2 days ago

As a young adult in the 1980s, I remember waking up on countless mornings wondering where I was and whom I had been sleeping next to. I often couldn't recall the drunken night before, and how I had ended up in bed with a stranger.
Now in my 50s, I'm going on sober dates and having alcohol-free sex for the first time in my life. It's a total shift away from decades of being a high-functioning alcoholic.
When I was a teenager, drinking copious amounts of alcohol was totally normal and perfectly acceptable. Even as a 15-year-old, I didn't think twice about drinking the two bottles of cider my brothers had bought from an off-licence.
All my first dating experiences, including losing my virginity, included alcohol.
When I moved to Manchester in my early 20s, it was the height of the rave scene, and I had a job as a half-naked podium dancer, a job you can't really do sober. I was a party girl having a fabulous time, but my love life was pretty chaotic, filled with drunken dates that ended in sex.
Drinking removed all my nervous inhibitions about sex, and made me unbothered by anxiety about my body or performance.
But I also made a lot of poor judgment calls about sex when I had been drinking. I'd often wake up in a stranger's bed, overwhelmed with self-loathing and regret. Occasionally, I wouldn't remember what had happened, and would make any excuse to leave.
Sex was a cure for a hangover
In my mid-20s, I decided I needed to settle down, so started an event-planning company and experimented with online dating.
When I was 31, I met Andy, who would later become my husband, on a dating website. We had a whirlwind love affair filled with mix tapes, dirty weekends and fabulous fun. Eighteen months after meeting, in February 2004, we were getting married on a tropical beach in Jamaica, surrounded by friends and family.
I remember thinking how absolutely perfect my life was.
As a couple, we drank together most nights. During the week, we'd share a bottle of wine after work. On Sundays, Andy would prepare and cook an epic roast dinner from noon, and we'd open three bottles of wine over the course of the day.
Even though, looking back, I can see we were drinking over the weekly limit, I wouldn't say it was problematic. We just enjoyed wine together.
All of our sex was had when we were either drunk, or in a morning after having been drunk the night before. Sex was quite often a cure for a hangover – it helped to clear my head. I remember having rather fabulous hung-over sex with Andy at a festival we went to.
When I became pregnant with our son, Finn, in 2007, I didn't drink, and while I missed it, I didn't have any physical symptoms of withdrawal.
Since we had spent three years trying to get pregnant, when I finally managed to do so through fertility treatment, Andy and I didn't have sex. I didn't want to jeopardise the pregnancy, and Finn was born safe and well in November 2007.
Drinking to cope
Life continued on – I was busy running an events business, and Andy helped run things at home. Twelve years into our marriage, Andy started complaining about chest pains. Seeing a doctor on three occasions, he was told the pains were caused by stress. Andy was never stressed – he was one of the most laid-back people I knew – so I pushed for him to get an electrocardiogram.
It turned out that the chest pains were being caused by a heart attack. He was rushed into the hospital, where doctors put three stents in his heart.
The night we got home from the hospital, I slept in the guest room because Andy was snoring so loudly. At 6am, I was woken by the most awful sound – Andy was having another heart attack. For 40 minutes, I did CPR on him, before the ambulance arrived and took him to the hospital.
Once the paramedics had taken over, I went straight to the wine rack and downed an entire bottle of wine in seconds. It was my first reaction – my way of coping. Before leaving for the hospital, I poured vodka into a Diet Coke bottle so I'd have something to get me through the next few hours.
For two weeks, I sat by Andy's bedside, hoping and praying. Finally, the consultant told me the bad news: our story would not have a happy ending. Andy had suffered a catastrophic brain injury as a result of the lack of oxygen to his brain. There would be no recovery in sight for him.
He was transferred into 24/7 nursing care, and I was told he would never come home. For three years, I lived anticipating his death, preparing myself for the grief of losing him. Yet at the same time, I had already lost him. He didn't recognise me. Although married, I was already widowed.
'Chapter two'
This is the point where my drinking became a huge problem. My perfect life had been shattered, and all I wanted to do was numb the pain of what had happened. Although I couldn't start a day without a glass of wine, I never missed a day of work and Finn never missed a day of school.
Just as the pandemic hit, in April 2020, Andy died.
Unable to leave the house, I tried to juggle my grief, parenting, and my business. It all became too much. The world, my world, had fallen apart, and I coped by sitting in the hot tub in the garden with a drink in hand.
When the world got back to normal after lockdown, I just carried on drinking. I couldn't find a way through my grief. I saw a doctor, who prescribed me antidepressants, which I took alongside alcohol.
Joining a support group for young widows, I found a tribe of women who had experiences of loss that mirrored my own. One of them asked whether I had thought about my 'chapter two' – dating again after losing Andy two years prior.
With her encouragement, I downloaded Tinder, and quickly realised how much online dating had changed from when Andy and I had first met. It was like the Wild West, full of d--- pics and married men. It was a really dreadful dating experience. Lots of the men didn't know how to respond or treat me when I told them I had been widowed. I ended up creating a dating app for widows – Chapter 2 – to connect people who know what it's like to be a widow.
Even though I felt I was turning my pain into positivity, I was still broken inside, and still drinking heavily – several bottles of wine a day, or Diet Coke and vodka when I needed to hide what I was having.
I had two short-term relationships, but pushed both men away because of my drinking. They both confronted me about it, and when they did, I broke it off. I couldn't admit I had a problem.
On one date at a music festival, I got so drunk that I fell down a flight of stairs and got badly bruised.
In 2023, I had another drunken fall that resulted in a trip to hospital. In November 2024, I had a seizure when I briefly tried to stop drinking.
The people closest to me – Finn, my dad, and my two best friends – were very worried about me, and I felt so much shame about how bad things had got.
Days before Finn's 17th birthday in November 2024, I phoned my private insurance company and told them I needed to go to rehab. 'It is the best birthday present you can give me,' Finn said to me when I told him.
Waking without shame or remorse
Thirty-one days after checking myself in, I left rehab, and haven't had a drink since. To mark 90 days of sobriety, I took myself on a cruise, which is where I met Troy.
He became my first-ever sober kiss, and we went on to have sober sex. It felt like the first time, and I suppose it was – the first time I was truly present during sex.
I was totally aware for all of it, albeit nervous about someone seeing me naked. I noticed that, in the past, I'd always been a selfish lover, but without the crutch of alcohol, I was more active while lovemaking.
In the morning, I woke without any shame or remorse.
Now, Troy and I remain friends with benefits, and I've dated others since him. The more I've dated without the 'Dutch courage' alcohol provides, the more my confidence has grown. But it has taken practice.
Without the empty calories of alcohol, I've lost some weight, and feel so much more body-confident during sex.
I make better choices about men when I'm sober, having sex only with people I genuinely like and see potential with. All-sober sex has resulted in further dates with that person – no one-night stands anymore.
But the biggest challenge of dating sober remained: having to tell my dates why I wasn't drinking. As soon as my date noticed, the reasons for my sobriety would come up. It was too much to reveal, too soon.
Having already created a dating app for widows, I set up another dating app called SoberLove, for people who wanted a connection without the crutch of alcohol. It's been really well received and given me so much purpose, as I help people who have chosen sobriety to find relationships.
Getting sober has been one of the best things I've ever done. It's been one day at a time since I left rehab, but I know I will never drink again, and my dating life is all the better for it.
As told to Lauren Crosby Medlicott
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