I have an older boyfriend that drinks. I’m afraid if I don’t drink with him he’ll think I’m not cool and break up with me. What should I do?
Don’t drink with him. Drinking with him can start a habit of you as a drinker, a habit that may well continue past when your boyfriend is long gone out of your life. Sooner or later the relationship will probably end. It would be too bad if the reason that you became a drinker was that you were so desperate to keep a relationship going, a relationship that ended anyway but now you were a drinker. Drinking behavior is not just something that you can just turn off when you want to. Also drinking just to keep a relationship going is part of the “I’ll do anything to keep a guy,” “I don’t care what happens with me I just want to keep him,” pattern that is the disastrous basis for future bad relationships. Not drinking with him could jeopardize your relationship. But drinking to keep him jeopardizes you.


One drink isn’t enough to get you drunk, right? Why is having just one drink every now and then such a bad thing? Can it hurt me?
Most drinking happens in the company of other friends who are drinking, the problem is that most people do not stop with one drink. Don’t kid yourself otherwise. Also especially if you are not a regular drinker, one drink is enough to have you feel it, to lower your self-control, and make it easier to go beyond the one drink.


I recently turned 21 and my younger friends ask me to buy alcohol for them all the time. It really makes me uncomfortable, but I hate to say no. Is there anything I can say to get them off my back?
Not really, other than “No.” What you say to them is not going to make a big difference. What will get them off your back is if you say “No,” and then stick with it. They will pester you. They will be mad at you for saying “No.” They will continue to try to get you to change your mind. But if they learn that you really mean what you say, if they learn that there is no use in bugging you to buy for them because you won’t, they will stop. And that will be the end of it.


I play varsity sports at my high school and a lot of my teammates drink alcohol. I hate being the odd “man” out, but drinking alcohol is against our team policy. Should I tell the coach?
There is no question that with many sports teams there can be a very strong culture of drinking. Despite the fact that team members can get in trouble because of the drinking, can jeopardize their continuing on the team, can negatively effect their performance – they drink anyway. The alcohol can become part of the camaraderie. If you aren’t a drinker, you may have to find friends who don’t drink either – outside of the team. The fact is that being a non-drinker on a team of drinkers can be a little lonely.


My little sister is getting to the age that she will be exposed to alcohol. If she asks me about drinking, what advice should I give her?
Some good reasons not to drink. Once you get into drinking there gets to be the very real risk that the drinking itself takes over as a force in your life. An absolute fact about drinking is that with everyone whose drinking controls what they do and controls their own drinking behavior, all of them – all of them - think that it is not so. They truly believe that they are in control of their drinking, not the other way around. But they are wrong. Another big problem that comes with drinking is that it puts you in situations where events happen, where you do things, that had you not been drinking you would have chosen not to do. That is, drinking can choose for you, rather than have you make the choices – even about major issues in your life. Another problem is that there is nothing in high school that can create genuine trouble more than drinking - trouble that does negatively impact your life. Last, drinking can permanently change your life, for drinking can change what fun is. Where fun can be found in a rich variety of life experience, with many drinkers fun is defined as drinking. Period. That is what happens with drinking.