We loved boozy dinners, cocktails and champagne. Then I saw crushing truth about what alcohol had done to me and quit… but didn’t foresee the impact on my marriage: DAISY BUCHANAN

Three years ago my husband Dale and I went on a Scandinavian city break. We were on the train between Copenhagen and Malmö when I started crying and couldn’t stop.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me, but my anxiety – which had dogged me for years – was suddenly overwhelming. I felt scared and utterly ashamed of myself, and I couldn’t explain why.

I couldn’t ignore the fact that the night before I’d drunk several large glasses of wine. And the night before that. And the one before that.

My sadness always seemed deeper and heavier when I was hungover. It was a link I’d been mulling over for months, even years.

Desperate to change my state of mind, in that moment, I decided I needed to do something radical. So I gave up drinking on the spot.

‘I think it’s the booze,’ I told Dale. ‘I need to quit. And if I don’t stop straight away, I’m scared that I won’t be able to stop ever.’

But Dale was alarmed – and disappointed. We had booked a special midsummer celebration dinner for that night, with cocktails and a wine pairing.

‘Don’t you want to wait until we get back from holiday?’ he asked. For him, my decision came out of the blue. After all, it wasn’t as if I was an alcoholic – I didn’t drink every day or in secret. Frustrated, I told him: ‘I just can’t keep drinking, knowing it’s making me feel worse and worse.’

But Dale didn’t understand. ‘I have so many special memories of the two of us, sitting in bars together,’ he said, sadly. ‘Does this mean that you regret it? Were you unhappy the whole time?’

‘Of course not!’ I said. It was true.

Like many couples, Dale and I had fallen in love over alcohol. In fact, we both said we didn’t know how anyone could date sober.

In the UK, we tend to bond over booze. It seems to make us more relaxed and uninhibited. After a few drinks, we forget not only our own flaws but those of the people we’re getting to know.

When Dale and I met for cocktails on our first date, he seemed urbane and elegant in a beautifully tailored vintage suit. Would I be sophisticated enough for him? By the time I’d started my second Old Fashioned, though, my nerves had disappeared, and I was deep in the throes of my favourite subject – literature. 

I fell for Dale straight away because he loved reading just as much as me. We bonded over less well-known authors, such as Elaine Dundy, Jonathan Ames and Terry Southern. We enjoyed stories about wild parties and unbridled hedonism.

Another huge tick was Dale’s great enthusiasm for cocktails. In the past, I’d dated two kinds of men – big beer drinkers, and wine snobs. Dale was different. Firstly, he loved looking for unusual places to drink, and he had a real sense of adventure. 

Sometimes we’d go to the American Bar at The Savoy, and sometimes we’d go somewhere strange he’d read about online, often descending stairs and ending up in shadowy basements. (‘I’ll walk down in front of you,’ he’d joke. ‘If there’s a murderer at the bottom, they’ll murder me first.’)

Secondly, he wasn’t afraid of a maraschino cherry. He loved super sweet, whiskey-based cocktails, and encouraged me to order anything I liked the sound of, instead of choosing a drink that made me seem sophisticated. I could be myself with Dale.

When we moved in together in 2012, our cocktail odysseys turned into nights on the sofa with wine. Both self-employed writers who worked from home, every so often we’d take our laptops to the pub. We’d order two halves and spend an afternoon typing in companionable silence, before celebrating the end of the working day with a drink.

Dale took me to Paris and we attempted to follow in Hemingway’s footsteps, drinking in every single bar that the celebrated writer frequented. (By the fourth bar, feeling worse for wear, we decided that it might be faster to simply visit the bars that Hemingway didn’t drink in.)

Back home, whenever I finished writing a book or met a big deadline, Dale would buy a bottle of champagne. When I was struggling to figure out a novel plot, he’d take me to the pub and help me work it out over red wine.

We loved hosting big, boozy dinner parties for our friends. He’d spend hours blending frozen strawberries to make daiquiris. Together, we’d go to our local wine shop and chat about what we were going to serve our guests.

It felt as though we had everything in common, but over time, I started to notice small but significant differences. Dale loved to drink. I loved being drunk. When Dale suggested going out for ‘a drink or two’, he meant it literally. But I’d have a third and then decide that nothing I was doing the next day could possibly be so important that I couldn’t have a fourth.

When Dale went out without me, I knew he could usually be relied upon to come home before midnight. Occasionally he’d be slightly tipsy, but his drunkenness was barely detectable. But when I went out without Dale, all bets were off.

One morning, I woke up feeling dreadful and was stunned to discover Dale wasn’t in bed with me. Fearing the worst, I crept to the bathroom and found him in the hall with a mop. I could smell vomit.

‘What happened?’ I asked, in a small voice.

His face darkened. ‘Don’t you remember?’

I remembered nothing. ‘You opened the front door, threw up on your shoes, and then passed out.’

I felt disgusted with myself. When I was a student, I’d done this sort of thing all the time, but now I was in my 30s. I was married. Bursting into tears, I whispered: ‘I’m so sorry.’

Dale took me in his arms. ‘Don’t cry… I was just so worried. You weren’t answering your phone. I was terrified that something had happened to you.’

These events were rare, but not rare enough. And even though I did my best to moderate my drinking, the morning after was always tinged with that same sense of disgust and self-loathing.

Two years into married life, keen to trade London for a life beside the sea, we moved to the Kent coast. Secretly, I hoped that the move might change me. In London, there were far too many opportunities for excess.

But moving to Margate in the height of summer meant I was soon drinking even more. We were making new friends and hosting old ones who fancied a trip to the seaside. And as my drinking accelerated, I started to feel sad and lost.

Dale knew I was unhappy and I knew it was affecting our relationship. I wasn’t the fun, adventurous girl he fell in love with and was starting to drag him down. Crushed by anxiety, I didn’t want to do anything.

My drinking had also caused me to gain weight and none of my favourite clothes fitted. I’d eat next to nothing and end up drinking on an empty stomach, which inevitably led to a dinner of crisps and a Domino’s pizza.

Dale never said my weight gain bothered him. But I didn’t feel attractive, and I didn’t want to initiate sex. I felt filled with self-pity. I was worthless. Why would he want me?

There was a brief period of respite when I drank – and worried –far less during lockdown. But when things returned to normal, anxiety roared back into my life again. Hangovers brought unbearable emotional lows.

Largely, I wrestled with alcohol and my mental health in secret. I thought that if I could get my anxiety under control, I’d be able to drink happily, in moderation, like everyone else.

But mentally, I was going to some shockingly dark places. I often felt worthless and filled with self-loathing, self-pity and despair. I’d struggled with these feelings ever since I was a teenager. Even though I’d learned to manage them with healthy coping mechanisms – therapy, exercise, journalling – the more I drank, the harder it was to corral them.

I was scared to tell Dale just how low I felt, because I was scared to express my thoughts out loud.

Then came our Copenhagen city break and the realisation I had to quit drinking once and for all.

Dale’s disappointed reaction wasn’t down to lack of support for my decision, but more indicative of how integral alcohol was to our relationship.

He later said the hardest thing for him was learning how much I’d been struggling with my mental health alone. I’d also found a solution that would have a serious impact on our lives together.

Dale would never judge anyone struggling with addiction; he had friends who were in recovery programmes. But I didn’t drink in the way that they drank. I had to explain that though I wasn’t a conventional alcoholic, I wasn’t someone who could happily drink alcohol either.

‘It’s as though I’m emotionally allergic to booze,’ I explained. ‘It’s not doing my body any good – and what it’s doing to my brain is far worse.’

Back home, I didn’t attend a recovery programme, but I absorbed many of the mottos and practices that I read about in drink memoirs. ‘One day at a time’ was my favourite. If the idea of quitting forever felt impossible, I didn’t have to think about forever.

Together, we took it one day at a time – and there were good days and bad days. On Dale’s birthday, we went for a walk in the Kent countryside and ended up in the pub. Sitting in a beer garden with a bottle of Heineken Zero, eating sun-warmed plums picked by the landlord, I felt full of joy. It was no different and no less happy than his birthday celebrations the year before. Maybe even happier.

But later, meeting friends in a different pub, I felt filled with irritation. The space seemed unbearably hot, loud and crowded. I didn’t even want a drink. I wanted to go home.

‘Why did you pick this place?’ I asked Dale, angrily.

‘You used to love this bar!’ he said, adding what sounded suspiciously like ‘and you didn’t used to complain so much’.

But after about six months, we both started to feel the benefits. I slept better – that made me much calmer and happier. I noticed I wasn’t as snappy or reactive.

So much of my general anxiety was bound up in future fears. Giving up alcohol made me better at living in the present.

And I found that I had so much more enthusiasm for life in general. Drinking had taken up a lot of time and headspace.

When my mental health was at its worst, I’d stopped wanting to try new things – but now, instead of going to bars with Dale, we were going to films, gigs, exhibitions and comedy shows.

And while drinking had made me feel drained, these activities made me feel nourished and stimulated.

I’m lucky that Dale has been so supportive, because the response elsewhere has been mixed. Most of my friends think it’s positive, and some are experimenting with sobriety themselves – but others are baffled by my decision and they think Dale is very brave and strong. They’ve told me they couldn’t imagine being with someone who didn’t drink.

Family parties can be complicated, too – they can be a little intense, and it’s strange to be on the sidelines as Dale joins in with the drinking. But I’ve learned to love dancing sober and I’m still one of the first on the floor at a wedding.

Now 40, it’s been almost three years since I quit. Dale still drinks moderately – he’s possibly the only person in the world who can drink three quarters of a glass of wine – and we still go out for cocktails.

There’s a very stylish bar in Margate that makes an exceptional alcohol-free margarita.

Occasionally, I miss real alcohol; if we’re presented with liqueurs at the end of a meal I’ll feel sad we can’t toast each other. And I also miss the feeling of meeting Dale’s eyes when we’re standing at the bar and saying, ‘Shall we just get a bottle?’

I was so scared that when I quit drinking, we’d stop having fun together and lose the intimacy and sense of connection we’ve built. But that hasn’t happened. I’m happier and more confident, and I think this makes me a better partner. I’m more patient, less reactive and I don’t struggle with destructive self-pity.

I even feel sexier, partly because I’m much more tuned into my body, and partly because I’ve got much more energy. (If Dale had known about the benefits that my sobriety would bring to our sex life, he might have persuaded me to quit years ago!)

It’s ironic that I drank, hoping to generate the feelings I’ve discovered in sobriety. And it’s ironic that I fell in love with Dale over cocktails, but it’s being sober that has made my love for him stronger and deeper.