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Yeah - so long as the booze is flowing, and even better if the other person is paying to keep it flowing. Put that drinker with their worst enemy without booze, and what human connections do they find? What human connections do they maintain after they sober up and need to go hunting for the next patsy to buy the booze?
Personal confession: I've had strangers, guys who were plainly dependent on booze, try to ask me to go to the pub with them and I knew it was only because they thought they could get me to pay for their booze in exchange for 'male company'. It was not about "finding human connections", it was "get someone to buy my next fix because I drank all my money today and have nothing left". I'm not the type, even in my younger days, who gets asked by random guy "hey can we go for a drink" because I'm just simply that attractive.
I think you may have experience with an entirely different type of drinker than others here are talking about. It may be the rest of us who are unusual, I only really drink with other people who have their shit together so I've never experienced this, if anything the people I drink with fight over the check as a status thing. And none of them are going around asking random people to go to the bar with them as they all have friends that would like to go to the bar with them already.
See above what I said about the Irish problem with drink 🤣 For the record, these events happened in bus station tea rooms (when they still had the tea room in the bus station). So yeah, guys who were plainly what you could call alcoholics but not yet at the level of the guys lying on the street with the bottle in the brown paper bag.
So this is why I start twitching when reading things like the comment above about "I need a drink with my meal, when I'm watching TV, when I get home from work, when I'm hanging out with friends, when I'm out socialising" or "things are more fun than when I'm sober" because to me, that's not "social drinking", that's "eventually you'll be leeching off others for drink because you've drunk all your money".
Different environments, different types of people. If your experience of drinking is "a few beers when I'm hanging out with the guys", I'm happy for you. But there are reasons people do support prohibition campaigns about a wide range of activities, because for every person who is "why are these killjoys trying to do away with harmless fun social activities?", there is another person whose experience is "that activity is not harmless, fun or social".
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Agreed. Absolutely willing to accept that I'm the outlier, but I have never had someone invite me out drinking with them with the expectation that I would be paying for their drinks (if anything the opposite, where the person inviting others out pays for the first round for everyone).
The only situations I have heard of that align at all with that are sketchy situations meeting women in East Asia where at the end of the night guys with baseball bats come out along with the bill to make sure you pay the inflated drink prices. And even then purely in a "friend of a friend heard this happened to another guy" sense.
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We all tabulate it and figure it out Venmo, even if we're pretty drunk. Bunch of nerds, I tell ya.
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