So yesterday’s date didn’t happen. The dude (let’s call him Dave), flaked on me and I am sooo relieved as I’m just not in the right headspace AT ALL at the moment. However, it got me thinking about the connection between drinking and dating and I have decided to do myself and all the straight, single men of Sydney a favour and take myself off the market for the forseeable future.

My tendency to repeat the same patterns when it comes to dating and relationships has been a big motivator behind this sober stint. All my relationships, long term and short, have been developed under the influence of copious amounts of wine.

Towards the end of last year, when I walked away from yet another uninspiring relationship with yet another self absorbed and emotionally unavailable guy, I really began to despair a bit. I felt like I was stuck in this endless cycle, on a neverending treadmill of dysfunctional men with commitment issues. It started with my marriage when I was 25 and after that ended it’s just kept on going. It’s like I date one guy in many different forms. Look this one is different, he has a beard!

It goes like this….

I’m in a good place, happily single and committed to sobriety, usually with a few weeks of not drinking under my belt. I’m starting to evaluate my life, implement positive changes and generally get my shit together. I’m focusing on my kids, work and I’m into my running and training for an event. Life is good. I’m not looking but someone comes along. He’s not exactly everything I’ve dreamed of, but he’s pretty cute/funny/smart so I think well there’s no harm in a coffee. I need to get ‘out there’ and push myself out of my comfort zone. Don’t want to end up an old spinster with cats! Just have some fun!

By the third date I’m downing cocktails at a rooftop bar, I’m too hungover on weekends to run, I miss deadlines at work because I’m too distracted and can’t concentrate and I start to become preoccupied with Mr Wonderful after just a few weeks. He just has me so off balance, it’s exciting and I spend my evenings after the kids are in bed lying on the lounge drinking wine and picking apart every little text or conversation to try to figure out how he feels about me.

He says he’s not really looking for a relationship, but he hints that in a bit more time, maybe… that we have something special, definitely…but it’s not a great time right now – he’s just got out of a relationship/he’s travelling a lot with work/needs to prioritise his career/lives in another country. I brush it all off and pour myself another glass of wine. I know he will change his mind, we have something amazing, how could he not see that?

Each time there’s another clear sign he’s just not that into me I will drink it away. When we’re apart I’ll agonise endlessly over the relationship and where it’s going, but when we’re together and there’s wine everything will seem perfect. And there’s always wine.

It will take anything from a few weeks to a few years but eventually I will wise up. The signs will become impossible to ignore and I’ll pick my flagging self respect off the floor and leave. I’ll go no contact, defriend him on social media and I will start to rebuild my neglected life. He’ll try to come back after a few months, once he realises that I am actually serious, but when I’m done I’m done.

I grieve, play sappy songs endlessly, cry in the car, throw myself into work, drink in bars and ramble on about how unfair it all is, wallow. Then I pull myself together slowly, get back to the gym, stop drinking, commit to sobriety, start to feel better, make plans, start running again, get in a good place and start to feel confident, look better…As soon as I’m back up another eligible looking male turns up on the scene. This one seems different and so it starts again.

It’s exhausting, depressing and downright pathetic. I’m a smart woman, I’m better than this. So when I walked away from the latest disappointment last September, after a year of putting up with an abundance of his drama, I decided to just stop and instead focus on embracing singlehood until such a time as I could figure out how to break the cycle. I don’t want to be a bitter 40 something divorcee and I genuinely don’t believe I need a man to be happy. It’s like they take over my brain and I forget who I am and what’s really important. Kind of like something else we could mention…

I’ve come to the realisation that unavailable men are as much an addiction for me as wine is. They are an escape from the reality of my life. I have a larger than average amount of shit to deal with on the day to day but if I can get preoccupied with will he commit or won’t he and get all caught up in the drama of being in an unhealthy codependent relationship it means I don’t have to think about all the STUFF.

On top of that the dysfunctional men and the wine are intrinsically linked. While I have one in my life I will never be able to escape from the other. The men are always heavy drinkers which means a threat to my soberness, the wine means I ignore the early red flags and plaster over the obvious holes in the relationship for far too long and it just all feeds into each other. The more I drink the more depressed and anxious I get about the relationship, the more I drink to cover it up etc. Where I’ve gone wrong up to now is trying to get rid of one while keeping the other. It just won’t work, cold turkey on both is the only way I see to move forward.

I also need to find ways of dealing with my crap rather than looking for an out and until I can do that and stop using men as a distraction I’m probably not going to attract the right sort of person or even be interested in them if I do. So I am officially taking myself out of the dating pool until I have six months of sobriety under my belt then I will re-evaluate. I’m a little freaked out by this but it feels like the right thing to do if I actually want to move forward and stop repeating the same patterns. I see a lot of netflix in my future but that’s OK.

On another note it’s been a week now and I am still waiting for that extra energy I keep hearing I’ll have. Still feel like I’m hung over, tired, dizzy and really down but I’m sure it will take a while for my body and brain to recalibrate so I just need to be patient.