Smooth Sailing

Boating and drinking are synonymous. You think boats; you think boat drinks. Buffet has an album by the same name for gosh sake. So when my husband and I boarded a cruise with four sixteen-year-olds for Spring Break we felt the pull, a strong pull, to belly up to the floating bar for a strawberry margarita, piña colada, mojito…anything with rum or tequila and an umbrella. Of course we felt it. This has been our life long story. What’s cruising without boozing?

Committed as we are, however, we were able to not just blindly zombie walk to the bar. We took a minute to talk about how we felt. First of all, what was that drink going to do for us physically? Based on research and personal experience, we know that a cocktail, no matter how appropriately festive it might look in our hand, is going to give us a 20 minute dopamine dump ONLY. It’s going to be a really nice 20 minutes don’t get me wrong. It’s why we all do it. It’s extremely compelling, it feels really good and freeing, and everybody (like 3000 fellow cruisers) is doing it. The pull is extremely strong.

But 20 minutes is over in a flash, and then what? It’s a seven day cruise. That’s a long time to be chasing another 20 minutes. And as the chase progresses, so do the hangovers, the malaise and the weight gain, along with the compounding health issues associated with constant drinking. And people were constantly drinking on this cruise. Our balcony was right above the most popular onboard pub and folks were yucking it up at 9am at the outside bar. They would loudly repeat themselves and then laugh hysterically, all in the pursuit of fun.

I’m no fun I guess. I used to be fun. I used to live it up on cruises. I’ve taken three cruises over the years. They were fun. I think? The one I took in college I could swear was fun, but in hindsight I’m actually just glad I survived it and wasn’t the lead story on some 20/20 missing persons special. When I took my mom for her 60th birthday I was in my late 20s. I remember being so hungover in Jamaica that climbing the beautiful Dunn Water Falls was reduced to a an awful, green-faced chore. Even five years ago, when my husband and daughter and I set sail, I was practicing moderation and struggling with the effort of it. Moderating might forgo the hangovers and silliness, but it’s stressful in and of itself.

So to go on a cruise without partaking and find it to be a liberating and more enjoyable experience? Again, I am blown away by the joy of sobriety. There was not a single thing that I didn’t do sober that I would have been doing, alcohol in hand. We sat at the bars and talked with strangers. I ordered a virgin mojito and Abel got a Heineken 0.0.** We went to shows, danced, got in the hot tub, did adult things, ate nice meals, read books, suntanned and pondered the horizon. No hangovers. No stress. It was what a vacation should look like: relaxing. It’s taken several months of doing familiar things in this new sober light to fully comprehend that alcohol makes life harder not easier. I was just telling myself a different story before, one that had been written by my parents and society, one that I wholeheartedly bought into and promoted.

I was accused recently of just trying to convince myself that I don’t want alcohol. I can cop to that. I am convincing myself, and I am succeeding. I am writing a new story of how to live my life. Actually we are writing a new story. I’m very thankful to my husband in this process. He is convinced as well, and even though his motivations are different from mine we have come to similar conclusions. “Fun” might be getting redefined, but at this age neither of us have a problem with that. It makes for much smoother sailing. Feel free to come aboard.

** I plan on writing an email to Norwegian Cruise lines suggesting they buy more that a 12 pack of non alcoholic beer! We chased down every last N/A on the ship, and even though we had the adult drink package we got charged $.63 a bottle. (We could have drunk well tequila all day for free). Seeing as this is the fastest growing beverage market, they need to get on board with the AF crowd.