In comparing people who drink and people who do not drink, one may come to the conclusion that people who drink are more likely to have friends and an active social life than people who do not drink.
Do you agree or disagree? Why or why not?
(I would tend to agree: most of the non-drinkers I know have quite quiet social lives while the drinkers are quite socially active.)
WRS - mi az jannat yaa az dozakh ast
How many of the drinker’s friends are only around when there’s drinking to be done?
I’d agree as drinking is predominantly a social activity. I’d question the quality of the interaction though 
I find my social interaction when not drinking to be more enjoyable, but less common, with drinking it’s by far more common but often less enjoyable as the drinking usually turns into heavy drinking.
Blue Sky, you summed it up perfectly with words I could not find 
What do you mean by people who don’t drink? If you include people who drink only a bit on social occasions?
If so, I’ll sort of agree. I don’t, however, think that the number of actual friends a person has is contingent on drinking behavior–the most happily social people I know don’t drink much at all. It just seems like people who drink have a larger number of acquaintances with whom they do things (i.e. party).
Also, many of the social scenes for adults involve at least some imbibing; if you don’t want to do that you’re going to stay away from a lot of the typical social situations by default.
No, I disagree. If for one reason or another you can’t or don’t want do drink alcohol, it’s very easy to still socialize. You can get a ginger ale, which no one can tell if it’s a scotch and soda or not. Or you can get a non-alcoholic beer. Nobody can tell if that coke has rum in it. And if anybody would not socialize with me because I can’t consume more than a tiny bit of alcohol (medication interactions), the heck with 'em, to put it politely. None of anybody’s dam business what I choose to imbibe.
Are they more social as a result of their drinking, or are they drinking in an attempt to be more social?
In other words, did the drinks get them the friends or did the friends get them the drinks?
Well there are different types of drinkers. The social alcoholic, who started out only drinking socially, will have a lot of friends because he is always going out. The alcoholic who wants to drink to forget bad memories is not going to have a lot of fun and fewer friends.
I did not have many friends when I was drinking and there was no difference when I stopped.
I don’t think that drinkers on average have a better social life or more friends than people who do not drink. In my university days, all my friends drank. As I get older, more and more of my new acquaintances are habitual nondrinkers. While this means that we have fewer people to share our nice wine collection, I have not noticed my newer friends being less social or having fewer friends than my older ones.
I don’t drink, and I have always had a good social life. (Granted, now that we’re a couple of middle-aged parents, sometimes a good social life consists of a rented DVD and a takeout pizza with the kids.)
I don’t, however, hang out with drunks. All my parents’ friends were drunks. I asked my mom, once, why she didn’t throw a party and *not *serve alcohol. “Those people would be such crashing bores,” she said.
Eee-yup.
If ‘active social life’ means ‘getting drunk all the time,’ you’re right on the money.
Depends on the culture.
In Ireland our social life is centred on the pub, so people who don’t drink AND won’t go to pubs will have problems, but people who don’t drink and who are happy to go out to pubs are no worse off than anyone else (although they’ll probably end up giving lifts home to all their drunken friends).
My Malaysian classmates, many of whom don’t drink for religious reasons, centre their social life around meals in each other’s homes. I would hardly call that a dull social life.
Depends on the drinker.
twicks, sober alcoholic with an active social life.
I don’t drink and I have a pretty damn active social life with both drinking and non-drinking friends.
I did cut ties with a couple not too long ago, though. Their drinking has become a major problem.
What’s your point? There’s always drinking to be done.
Seriously, this is kind of an obnoxious implication, and most likely from someone who has never been a social drinker, but thinks he knows what it’s about.
I’m not much a social drinker anymore, but my old drinking friends were friends. You know them at the bar. You shoot pool with them. Play pinball with them. You watch the game with them. You eat food with them. You tell jokes with them, have a lot of laughs with them, share memories with them. And yeah, if you need it, one of them will help you move the couch if you need it.
Is there something less meaningful about it because you always have a drink in your hand when you’re with them?
“Active social life” means being out and around people, interacting with people, discussing things with people, having fun with people, meeting new people.
A drinker naturally does that.
You all seem to think that it’s somehow phony, not real, because there’s alcohol involved. That’s part of the point of alcohol. It lowers your inhibitions. THAT’S A GOOD THING.
The most active social scenes I know about are my dog park and the bars. I don’t know of other social gathering places. . .coffee shops? Maybe, but how social is a guy with his laptop, the woman with her newspaper, the student with his homework, and the guy with his novel sitting in the corner?
Drinkers definitely have a more active social life. That doesn’t mean that the couple who has friends over for dinner every weekend, and has book club once a week doesn’t have a fulfilled social life. That’s all their aiming for. But it’s not more active than the drinkers.
Well, I’m a very light drinker (e.g. one beer is pretty much all I need or want in an evening – more than that just makes me sleepy) and dislike bars and the bar scene. And I live in suburbia. Result: social life is damn near non-existent. You * really * have to work at it to meet people if you don’t go to bars around here. I’ve been taking classes and going to the gym, but still, after six years living here, I’ve met less people than I did in my first month at college.
I’m not sure that “drinking” * per se * is the differential, though. Some people just like being around other people a whole lot and the pub scene gives them an opportunity to do that. Some of us enjoy our social interactions in smaller, quieter doses.
Note that the “hang around the pub drinking ginger ale” is not a great work-around. There’s very little more annoying than being the most sober person in a room. At best, everyone seems to be having a better time than you At worst, you have to talk to drunk people which is a lot like trying to have an intelligent conversation with a belligerent two year old.
This is a really silly statement. Everyone has buddies that they do one or two activities with and don’t see much of them otherwise. My brother gets together with a group of guys to play basketball once a week; when there’s no basketball playing going on, those friends aren’t around. I play online games with a couple people who I’ve known them for 3+ years. We get together a couple times a week to play games. If one of us stops playing, we don’t keep in touch. I simply don’t have much in common with them other than our mutual interest in online games.
Forming social groups around a mutually enjoyable activity isn’t unhealthy or wrong, and there’s a difference between close friends and people who you hang out with in only certain situations. Having a “drinking buddy” isn’t a bad thing unless the drinking itself becomes out of hand, and that can happen with or without a buddy.
Neither my wife nor I drink. Not because we’re rabidly anti-drinking or drinkers, we’re just not into it. So yes, we have a smaller social circle, but that suits us.
My parents didn’t used to drink until the late '60s, when they fell in with a crowd still doing that 1950s “come on over and get pissed” scene. My mom didn’t like it, but my father, who had never taken a drink until his 30s, went right overboard. And I played music in bars for about 20 years. I could write a really depressing book on what I’ve witnessed. So yeah, that colors my perception of it. But I can’t think of anything I’d like to do less than hang out with a bunch of people whose main goal was to throw up before the evening was over. And don’t think I’m using a wide brush here, I saw it happen hundreds and hundreds of times and did it myself for a number of years before I figured out what kind of people I’d rather spend time with.
My, my, such a defensive lot.
It’s ridiculous that I have to explain myself, but what I meant was, are these friends you can do things with that don’t include drinking or must you drink in order to be with these friends. Have one for me, won’t you?
I should have put this in the “Things You Don’t Get” thread.