Three years sober, and I always leave before the part that matters

Three years sober, and the honest difficulty is not the rope. It is that nearly everything social in this city happens around drink, and that most of how people here come to know each other happens in the loose hour after the thing itself has finished, which is precisely the hour I go home.

Thirty six, the city centre, nine years in, both ends. I am not asking anybody to change how they spend an evening, and I am completely comfortable in a room where other people are drinking. What I cannot do is build a relationship out of the part of the night that starts at eleven.

The result is that I know a great many people slightly and almost nobody well. Reputation here is built socially and I keep leaving before the social part gets properly going, which after three years has left me somewhat outside a thing I have belonged to for nine.

So what I want is a partnership that mostly happens away from all of that. Daytime, food, a standing evening at one or other of our places, weekends that are ours. I would still go to things occasionally and I would still leave early, and I would like that not to become a running conversation between us.

Not after a drinking partner. Not after a project of any kind. And I will discuss my own drinking exactly once, because it is settled, dull, and mine.