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Making Friends Without Alcohol

Can you have a social life without booze?

Benya Clark
Exploring Sobriety
5 min readDec 20, 2024

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This essay originally appeared in the Exploring Sobriety newsletter.

Photo by Matt Nelson on Unsplash

One of my biggest fears about getting sober was that it would kill my social life.

I wrote about this in a previous newsletter, and as I said there, it was an ironic fear because my social life wasn’t so great during my drinking years either.

I worried that without alcohol, I wouldn’t be able to make any friends. However, with alcohol, I was so busy drinking that my friendships faded away. It was a lose-lose situation.

In that previous newsletter, I already described all of the ups and downs that my social life has gone through since getting sober. It’s been a rocky road but has gradually improved with time. You can read all the details in: “Has Sobriety Ruined My Social Life?

In today’s newsletter, I want to revisit the topic but with a more practical focus: Exactly how have I made new friends since getting sober?

Let me start by saying that I’m no expert on this topic. The truth is that I’m not great at making friends, whether sober or drunk. But, I think that’s exactly why my advice can be extremely useful.

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Benya Clark
Benya Clark

Written by Benya Clark

I’m a lawyer turned writer from North Carolina. I write about sobriety, mental health, and more. Subscribe to my weekly newsletter at exploringsobriety.com.

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