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I’ve drunk alcohol exactly once. I was 5. My mother gave me a sip of her New Year’s Champagne, and after my liver threw a very interesting fit, I decided right then and there that the world of fermented grapes/yeast/ethanol/potatoes probably wasn’t in my future. Wine, women, and song are all very well, but you can have the first and I’ll keep myself occupied with the second two, thanks.
There are great things about being someone who doesn’t drink — or as we Brits call it, being teetotal. I’ve never had a hangover, and can look benignly at friends crawling across my living room floor on a Sunday morning while I do the crossword. I spend very little on a night out, remember it all the next day, and can consequently use everything I witness as blackmail. I’ve also had to learn to actually be scintillatingly interesting, rather than relying on the booze to do it for me.
However, the fact remains that alcohol is deeply ingrained in Western life; from shots on Spring Break, to aspirational cocktails that require endangered flowers and artisanal purple yak milk. And should you not choose to participate, people tend to have some pretty strong opinions about it.
Take the French waiter, who upon hearing that I couldn’t drink, looked at me in what I can only describe as visceral horror, before declaring “I would DIE” and abandoning our table to somebody else. Others assume it means I’m religious, straight-edge, or inclined to lecture them on their whisky habit, and edge away nervously.
If you also don’t drink, you know what I’m talking about. Here are 23 things that we teetotalers are tired of hearing.