When to Start Dating After Getting Sober. And Why AA Doesn't Help You.
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
So you have gotten through the initial phases of alcoholic detox. The first acute five-day withdrawal. It was hell, but you made it. You fought the constant, intense cravings and emotional rollercoaster in second phase to day forty-five. You kept that rudder straight to the six month mark. You battled insomnia and hypersomnia. Those nightmares are starting to become infrequent. You look back at your alcoholic life, now six months clean, and know for a fact you will never return. You are a sober being. You are integrating into this new world in which you are unfamiliar. It’s scary but far less than your previous world. You are ready to exist in it for the rest of your life.
So when should you go on that first date as a newly sober being?
Anyone who has been an alcoholic and was single during that time remembers what relationships were like. In many instances, the word relationship should be used lightly. A lot of the time, alcoholic dating doesn’t exist in any realm of healthy. When someone is an alcoholic, nothing in their life is healthy. Dating is no exception in John Barleycorn’s circle.
Chaos attracts chaos. Now there do exist marriages where only one is a constant companion to the mistress of J.B. Marriages have ended over alcoholism as well as post-alcoholism, many times thanks to the rooms, which become the new focal point of the former addict who now doesn’t believe he is former anything. But when you are living the alcoholic days, you are intoxicated a great deal of the time. Your judgment isn’t stellar. Good and well-balanced people do not go out and seek relationships with active alcoholics. And if they realize the person they are dating is an alcoholic under concealment, usually they will exit the door.
So who does that leave to date for the alcoholic? All of those who are either in the drinking lifestyle or have such low self esteem that they will simply take whatever is available. And the alcoholic usually takes whatever is in front of him with that blur of barley running the relay through his head. Many times at that social circle, where everybody knows your name. Do any of my former friends of Johnny remember that dating strategy? It isn’t one that could fall under the title of healthy.
The problem of picking the wrong partners isn’t just facilitated from the substance induced haze that Jimi wails on his strings. Alcoholics, most of the time, operate that way due to turbulent backgrounds, usually from childhood. They grow up not feeling terrific about themselves. This carries over into their adulthood. Simply put, they don’t believe they deserve decent in their lives. It’s not a conscious thought, but it is etched deeply under the surface.
I’m going to tell a very sad high school story. At the end of my junior year, I had been thrown out of my abusive home when I got big enough to stand up to my first bully—my father. I was being bullied daily at school as well. By the time I got to my new school in Norfolk, I wasn’t that timid weakling anymore. I had made a friend, Tammy, who also had a not so great home life. We talked everyday after school. She would follow me to the weight room after classes ended. Two things were obvious: I liked her and she liked me. At the end of junior year, she was to transfer to another school a mere thirty minutes away. The last day before summer, she gave me her number and said to call her. It would have been my first girlfriend. She gave me the long hug, gave me the signals, everything a female can do to give the green light, she did.
I froze. I was seventeen and my feet got icy. A week went by and I didn’t call. Then I was panicked that a week went by and another one passed as well. I let that green light turn red. I never called her. I never called her because, even with all those signals, I thought she really wouldn’t want to hang around the guy who just came from three years of torment. If I could go back in time, I would find my seventeen-year-old self and punch him in the face. I probably really hurt her feelings and wish I could find her to tell her I’m sorry.
That’s the point to this tragic tale. I wasn’t an alcoholic at seventeen. I barely touched the stuff. But when decent was placed in front of me, I pushed away from the table and ran out the room. The drinking started later. And most of the women that followed in those drinking days weren’t decent at all. They were lives of tragedy as well. Broken women from divorce. Broken women from terrible childhoods. Women who couldn’t be fixed. But we all existed on that island of broken toys. So we all stayed there together.
It becomes a very vicious cycle and slowly ingrains to a neurological pattern. You aren’t worth decent. You prove that with every new pseudo romance straight from the script of Barfly. Find those on that castaway island, fuel the chaos and repeat and rinse the cycle for that dirty laundry that never gets clean. You find them in the bars and outside of them. There seems to be an internal pulsing beacon that calls on the chaotic, drawing them together. The good people aren’t being signaled at all.
Then suddenly, you are sober.
Four months after my last outing with John Barleycorn, I disappeared into the mountains, coming out only every ten days or so to resupply in the remote towns next to the rising peaks. No music, no social media, no television, my only visitors were the occasional marmot and roaming cinnamon black bear of California. I had a journal and a few pens, those inked pages which became chapters in my work plugged above. I mentally relived every relationship with women I had every had since I had them. All but one were chaotic and dysfunctional. All but that one was damaged just like I was. The one who wasn’t, I dated at twenty-four, a few years before Johnny and I became best pals. She was the only exception to my rule.
When one becomes sober, it is necessary to find the root cause of that prior addiction. This is where Alcoholics Anonymous fails greatly. They believe it is an inborn disease and that you are always an addict. This is simply not true and more and more are challenging this long established program that was based on a religious awakening by Bill Wilson, not on any sort of scientific reasoning. In the rooms, it is a well known fact that many of the members date each other. Sure they do, they are still living on that island of broken toys. They aren’t reinventing their lives on all their planes, they are living in the mindset they are always and evermore addicts who are never cured. So they continue to date the same chaos they did when they were drinking, the few who actually quit drinking in AA.
That neural pattern of dating chaos will continue to exist once you quit drinking if you don’t take action to re-create your planes. The physical, emotional and advancement of Self. I can tell you from personal experience. You don’t realize the neural pattern is still there.
Ten months after I quit drinking, I was involved with someone I shouldn’t have been. She was living a chaotic life, beginning to develop a drug problem that took years to resolve, long after I was out of the picture. But that was what I was used to in my not so long ago normal. I finally broke it off with her and decided this was the last bad girl—ever. I was already engaged in the neural reprogramming to resolve the severe lack of self-worth that had developed years before I picked up the bottle. The probable reason I dropped this gal after a few months is because I had done this re-evaluation of my inner being. I knew I was better than this now. And I knew this toxic girl was the last one.
If you remain in AA, you will not do that. You will not be reinventing yourself, you will be in the rooms, chanting the mantras, smoking cigarettes and telling yourself you are sick and always will be. When your self-image is believed to be this deficit, then who are you going to have commonality with? Others who believe they are forever damaged. And the disastrous relationship pattern will continue.
Many in AA still don’t have healthy relationships because AA refuses to propagate the reconstruction of one’s being. It wants you to sit for the rest of your life in circle story time of your horrific past. Possibly this is why the few in the rooms who stay sober still fail in their marriages—many of them. The past is not only never rectified, but the spouse now has the new addiction and master status above all of Alcoholics Anonymous.
One point I do agree with AA. Take that year before you think about dating. You have to get through the initial phases of recovery first. Then you have to reconcile why you drank to begin with. You then have to fix that past and repair what is most likely lack of real self-esteem. That’s what I had to come face to face with in those mountains. That I had great physical prowess in bodybuilding, martial arts and past military endeavors that was masking lack of inner fortitude.
When you repair that broken inner being, you will then develop self-worth. What we in the military refer to as command demeanor. Simply put, you think you are worth something. And when you think you are worth something to this world, your spiritual plane is enhanced as well. You won’t tolerate being around toxic people any longer. You will find people of positivity that now match your own. You will not date those who are living in chaos ever again. When you know that, that is when it is time to go on a date.
For your being no longer resides on that island of broken toys.
To journey on a tale of epic transformation on a 2,660 mile trail check out: THE SHEPHERD AND THE RUNNINGWOLF: A PATH TO FORGIVENESS ON THE PACIFIC CREST TRAIL
(Usually free on KDP)
(Usually free on KDP)
For the condensed and orderly version of how I beat the addiction of alcoholism check out: THE SMALL BOOK: HOW I BEAT ALCOHOLISM AND WHY ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS DOESN'T WORK
(Usually free on KDP)
John Barleycorn taken from Jack London's book John Barleycorn. First published 1913
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