Am I an alcoholic if I drink wine every night?
Drinking wine every night does not by itself mean you are an alcoholic. What it does mean is that alcohol has become a fixture in your evenings rather than a decision you make, and that is worth taking seriously whatever word you attach to it.
The label is the least useful part of this question. I will come back to why.
Why you are asking a search engine
You are reading this late, probably in bed, probably after a couple of glasses, and you have almost certainly asked this question before and cleared the search afterwards.
That is worth noticing on its own. You did not ask your husband, your sister or your GP. You asked a machine, because a machine cannot look at you differently over breakfast.
Women in this position tend to interpret the secrecy as evidence of how bad things are. It is more useful to read it as evidence of how much you already know. Nobody researches something they think is fine.
What every night actually adds up to
Take the maths out of the abstract.
The UK guideline is no more than 14 units a week on a regular basis. A 750ml bottle of 13.5% wine is 10 units, and a large 250ml glass at 12% is 3 units.
Two large glasses a night comes to 42 units a week. Three times the guideline.
Two thirds of a bottle a night comes to around 47 units a week.
A bottle a night is 70 units, which is five times the guideline.
The NHS calls 14 units low risk rather than safe, because there is no safe level, and links regular drinking above it over 10 to 20 years to breast cancer, stroke, heart disease and liver disease.
Notice what is absent from all of that. No mention of parked cars, lost jobs, hidden bottles or morning vodka. The risk is calculated on volume over time, and your functioning life does not reduce the number.
Does the word alcoholic matter?
Clinically, there is a real thing being described. Alcohol dependence means your body has adapted to alcohol, so stopping produces physical symptoms and drinking becomes something you have to do rather than something you want.
If that is you, the word matters enormously, because it changes what is safe to do next. I will cover that in a moment.
If it is not you, the word does almost nothing except give you an exit. Every woman who has ever asked me this question was hoping for one of two answers. Either she is an alcoholic, in which case something has to change, or she is not, in which case she can close the laptop and pour another one tomorrow.
The trouble with the second answer is that you will be back. The question does not go away because it got an encouraging response. It goes away when the drinking changes.
When this is genuinely urgent
Some of this needs saying plainly, because it is a safety matter rather than a coaching one.
If you cannot get through a day without drinking, or you wake up shaking, sweating or feeling sick until you have had a drink, do not stop suddenly on your own. Withdrawal in physically dependent drinkers can involve seizures and can be dangerous, and it needs medical support. Speak to your GP, who will have had this conversation many times and will not be shocked by yours.
That is not most women reading this. But if it is you, it is the only paragraph on this page that matters tonight.
A better question than the label
The space between moderation and being dependent is generally termed as ‘grey-area drinking’. When ‘grey-area drinking’ women ask me if I think they are alcoholic, I ask them this:
How much of your mental life does alcohol take up?
Count the running total. Deciding whether tonight is a drinking night. Noticing what is in the fridge. Working out whether there is enough. Planning the shop around it. Negotiating the second glass. Calculating how you will feel at seven tomorrow. Waking at half three and doing the arithmetic on what you drank.
Now compare that against how much of your mental life something you genuinely do not care about takes up, like the buses in a town you have never visited.
A woman who takes alcohol or leaves it does not think about it. If you are running a low-level administrative process about wine all day, the label is beside the point. Something is already taking up room.
What I would do tonight if I were you
I drank every night for years, so I know exactly what the internal argument sounds like.
Here is what I would do, in order.
Count last week honestly, in bottles rather than glasses, including the one you drank standing up while cooking.
Multiply it out into units using the figures above, and sit with the number for a minute without explaining it.
Notice what time you woke last night, and how you felt in the first hour of the day.
Then take a fortnight off and watch what happens to your sleep. Not forever, and not as a declaration to anybody.
Two weeks off will tell you more about your relationship with alcohol than any quiz, and considerably more than the word alcoholic ever will.
If you are somewhere in the middle
Most women asking this question are grey-area drinkers, which means they are functioning, unworried about by anybody else, and privately keeping score. I have written about what grey-area drinking is in more detail, because it is where I spent years.
You do not need a diagnosis to decide you have had enough of the six o'clock negotiation. The permission you are looking for is not going to arrive from a search engine, or from a doctor, or from anyone who loves you and would rather not have the conversation.