Taken from Drinking: A Love Story by Caroline Knapp

"[...]Longing for intimacy and terror of it: a wish to merge with others and a fear of being consumed; profound uncertainty about how and when to maintain boundaries and how and when to let them down--weren't addressed with much texture or depth.

"No is an extraordinarily complicated word when you're drunk. This isn't just because drinking impairs your judgement in specific situations, like parties or dates (which it certainly may); it's because drinking interferes with the larger, murkier business of identity, of forming a sense of the self as strong and capable and aware. This is a difficult task for all human beings, but it's particularily difficult for women and it's close to impossible for women who drink.

"When she describes this, Meg talks about a component of anger and rebellion: she was in her late twenties and early thirties at the time, and she'd spent the better part of her young adult life responding to her fears about intimacy and sex by shutting men out, steering clear of relationships. There was something about drinking, something about getting drunk and sleeping with men she didn't know, that gave free rein to a host of buried feelings, to an undercurrent of neediness and longing she'd kept compressed in the darkest corner of her soul for years.

"The drink released this current, let it stream up and out. There was a fuck you, I am going to get what I want, Even if I feel I don't deserve it. Frustration and shame and fear and self-loathing and release, all rolled into one, all liquified and drained away by drink. She drank and she just did it, just said fuck you to her own complicated mix of feelings and did it. In some ways this worked: drunken, anonymous sex gave her the illusion of intimacy with none of the attendant risks, none of the aching vulnerability of sober sex.

"If you both long for intimacy and fear it, if you feel worthy of it and ill equipped to receive it and ashamed of yourself for wanting it, alcohol becomes a most useful tool, a way of literally drowning out the conflict. It's a way of giving license to the part of you that wants to say yes. Yes to life and yes to deep connection and yes to touch and comfort and love. The sad thing is, whatever sense of affirmation you get from anonymous, drunken sex is usually metabolized away with the booze in your system. Meg would wake up in the morning and feel like an idiot. She'd feel shame and regret and confusion.

"Oh shit. Head pounds, hands shake, mind races. Oh shit: what have I done?

"Drinking, drinking. Drinking and loving men, drinking and loving men who drink. I never once went out with a man who didn't like to get drunk. Never. Right from the start the idea of going out with a man who didn't like to tie one on was unthinkable to me, and would be for many years.

"This seemed perfectly reasonable, to choose drinking men. Alcohol can numb fear, and allow you to fake it, and take you places you literally don't want to go: strange beds. But it can also give you access to romance, a bridge to the positive sides of sexuality. Alcohol felt like the cement in female sexuality, at least it did to me: over the years the two would become so deeply linked that for the longest time I simply couldn't imagine one without the other. A first kiss without drinks? Forget it. Sex without liquor? No way. Drinking was integral to my sense of sexuality as a body part: no more, no less. And sometimes that form of integration was effective, amazingly so.

"I can almost feel the drink, feel how central it was to my experiences. Deaden the shock; facilitate the exploration. Voila: No problem; I can do this.

"Truman Capote once wrote that he saw in Elizabeth Taylor an 'emotional extremism, a dangerously greater need to be loved than to love.' Me, I was too cautious and inhibited and scared to give in to extremism of any kind in sobriety, emotional or otherwise. But when I drank, it happened. When I drank, the part that felt dangerous and needy gre bright and strong and real. The part that coveted love kicked into gear. The yes grew louder than the no."