I’m a lightweight and a violent drunk. So I answered 1, and even that’s a bit generous. I’ve been known to order a drink and nurse it the whole night. Lucky for me, when I’m out drinking I’m with either my best friend, my boyfriend, or both, so if someone gives me shit for not drinking I usually have someone there to rush to my defense.
I generally don’t drink but maybe two or three nights a month, but when I do, I generally end up drinking for at least ten hours hanging out with friends (get off work at 6, drink at a bar until 2, go back to someone’s house and eat and play video games or just bullshit with my friends, everyone goes to sleep around 5 or six).
So “only 12?” isn’t as bad as it seems.
Every other weekend or so I’ll have 1-2 margaritas or something, but you have to understand I take medication that greatly intensifies the effects of alcohol.
I’ve never been much of a drinker. My father is an alcoholic. I understand why because I think alcohol is one of the most amazing things, ever. Which is why I don’t drink it much.
I agree with this. I tend to have a beer or three 2 - 3 nights during the week, sometimes none sometimes 5 if I am out for wings. Fridays and Saturdays are another matter and they can be relatively normal or crazy if my wife has purchased tequila… 3 or 4 pints, then either a few glasses of red wine or a couple of dry gin martinis to take me through to bed. Unless my wife bought tequila, we’ve been known to polish off 3/4 of a bottle of the goddesses’ pee and a ton of beer more than once. Yikes.
Man, I suddenly feel a bit better about my own level of consumption.
Most nights, I’ll have a beer or a glass of wine with dinner and a whiskey or two afterward.
We hit a happy hour maybe two nights a week. I’ll usually have a pint of Guinness and a couple of bourbons, followed by another whiskey once we get home.
If we’re partying hearty, I might have five drinks without food, but pace the last two with water or coffee.
You’re drunk right now, aren’t you?
Funnily, this is why I drink it much.
I voted 4-6 for “a night of drinking”. If I’m going out for a nice dinner, alcohol not the focus, then usually 3 glasses of wine or so. But if I’m wanting to celebrate then I’m in the 4-5 range. That’s glasses of wine or mixed drinks (G&T, craft cocktails, etc). I don’t like beer all that much, just one or two with a burger or pub food sometimes.
If I drink more than 5ish drinks, I’m sick for at least a day. I tend towards horrible multi-day hangovers.
I don’t drink more than a glass of wine very often (less than weekly), more because of the calories than anything else.
As Albert Collins said:
Ditto! “Awkwardly” I am 3 glasses* of wine into this Thursday night, am I alone?
*using a unit of measurement we call “Robin Pours” in honour of Robin Scherbatsky’s epic wine pour in some lame HIMYM episode involving Ted’s sadness.
I answered “1”, but this is more accurate. I’ll have a drink more nights than not, but it’s a drink. Even when I’m doing what passes for “partying” nowadays, I won’t have more than three drinks anymore. At that point, there’s some trigger in my head that irresistibly reminds me that if I drink more, I’m going to feel like crap the next day. And to think it only took me about 30 years of drinking to learn that!
I always quit at the last one.
I don’t drink often, and it’s usually one drink before dinner. Even at parties and such, I’ll generally only have 2 or 3 over the course of the night. I drank considerably more in college, but I discovered that:
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It takes an awful lot to get me drunk, and I don’t like cheap booze. Getting drunk regularly was either prohibitively expensive, or an exercise in gulping down lots of unpleasant drinks.
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Weird shit happens when I get drunk. (I never did fully reconstruct the chain of events that ended with me waking up on horseback in a forest.)
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I don’t really like the feeling of being drunk, anyway. Anything past “slightly relaxed” bothers me.
**Drinkers: How many in a normal night of drinking? **
Don’t drink at all during the *night *mostly. On my days off I meet the local ‘coffee club’ at 11am sharp, only we don’t drink coffee. Two hours of lively discussion on politics, the weather and whatever is on the mid-day news.
Around 1:00 we are well prepared for our afternoon chores operating power tools or heavy equipment while continuing to drink all day.
But I never have a drop after dinner, it’s uncivilized.
If I drink (which I haven’t for a long time but am recently getting back into), it’s 1 night a week. Maaaaybe 2 nights, on very rare occasions. And I don’t drink casually, I only drink to get drunk. I get drunk off anywhere between 1/4 to 1/3 of a fifth of most hard liquors. So (a little napkin math here) between 6-9 drinks, once a week.
In order to truly “drink all day” one must begin on awakening. 
I just don’t want to become an alcoholic.
ETA: Interestingly enough, the average response to the poll - 4-6 drinks - is considered binge drinking.
What we in North America consider binge drinking, is what the rest of the world considers an apéritif.
Wel, then I will chip in. 
I am one of those people for whom alcohol has little attraction.
I like the taste of wine, but after two sips, I’ve had enough. I wished I could drink more wine; in moderation, red wine is very healthy.
I like sweet liquor, but mostly because of the sugar in it and then I’d rather have real candy instead of the liquid kind.
After the about three times I got drunk on purpose, I think : “Been there, done that, it was interesting the first two times, but no need to do it again”.
My husband is the same way. We have bottles of wine and liquor for guests, but if we don’t have guests, they collect dust. Then his mom will stay with us for a week and suddenly we need to buy new wine bottles.
Oddly, some people see our lack of interest in drinking as us wanting to be morally superior, or us having more willpower or something. We don’t. We just have tried it and we don’t particularly like it. It is easy for us.
That was why it was so easy for me to have weight loss surgery, where after surgery you can’t really drink alcohol anymore.
So a typical night of drinking, for us, is opening a small bottle of wine, sharing it over dinner with our guests, us both having a tiny glas, and both of us usualy throwing out most of that glass after dinner.
Hard to say. I can easily put back 4-6 in the space of 2 hours of hanging out at a bar with a buddy. Heck, dinner with my SO typically consists of splitting a bottle of wine and maybe a cocktail (so 3 drinks). But it’s not like I can keep that pace from 7pm until 5 in the morning. So I have to question when people say like 18 to 30+ drinks in one night.
I don’t know. It’s sort of like the “Why Are Americans Stupid” thread I started. Everyone says Americans can’t drink. But we do seem to spend a lot of time getting drunk. We just seem a bit more schizophrenic about alchohol as a society.
If I had the money to retire, alcoholism would be my dream.