How Drinking on a Date Affects Men and Women Differently
What’s your stance on drinking on dates? Some of us swear that alcohol keeps the conversation and the chemistry alive, while others instill a two or three drink limit to make sure that we don’t get hammered and start talking about our ex or our addiction to anime porn. Which way’s better?
According to a study published in the Journal of Personal Relationships, alcohol affects men and women totally differently. So much so, that when you’ve had that fourth glass of wine and are feeling the sparks, your date may be feeling like he’s never trying to see you again. That’s because alcohol makes women feel more intimate, while it actually makes men feel less intimate.
This could explain while the drunker a guy is, the more likely it seems that he’s looking for a quick fuck rather than love, or perhaps looking for the nearest toilet. Whereas the drunker women get, the more likely we are to call our ex, cry to our BFF about some trivial argument, or go home with a stranger in hopes of finding “the one.”
This study was done on a group of Australian National University undergrads (323 to be exact), the majority of which had drank an alcoholic beverage on a date within the last three months. On average, duos consumed six drinks together per date (sorry Millionaire Matchmaker, your algorithm doesn’t work in real life).
50% of the analyzed dates were at restaurants, 28% at bars/clubs, 9% at the movies, 6% at home (Netflix and chill?), and 4% at parties. After the participants explained the dates, the researchers had them rate how intimate they felt at the end of the date.
Many of us believe that alcohol increases this sense of intimacy (at least up to the point where you’re incoherent and begging for pizza), and research has backed this theory previously. The purpose of this study was to analyze how this effect differed between genders, which it did.
According to the research findings, while women got increasingly more intimate with alcohol, men actually became less intimate. The research doesn’t delve into why exactly that is so, but for some reason we imagine that guys stop thinking romantically and start thinking of pussy. Either way, this is only one study on Australian college students, and there’s no telling how this experiment would hold up if the participants were older or from another country.
With these findings in mind, there’s no harm in limiting your drinks on a date. We’ve all been on a date where we wished we hadn’t drank so much (okay, maybe just me), and if it really does reduce a guy’s intimacy, all the more reason to limit your alcohol intake. But, you definitely don’t need to limit it down to two drinks, I mean…that’s just ridiculous.
