Hey. Dana here.
I’m taking a pause from essay writing this week to give a huge, heart-sourced shoutout to author and Sober Sexpert
.Tawny’s book, Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without the Booze comes out next month. Pre-order now to score exclusive bonuses.
Here on Substack, Tawny writes
, a dating, sex, and relationships advice column for the sober and sober curious life. Check out our conversation here:Find my thoughts on Tawny’s forthcoming book below, and join me in cheering her on in the countdown to pub day!
Look, I’ll be honest: Dating and relating as a sober person can be all kinds of stressful.
I mean, the challenges of intimate, romantic, and sexual relationships are hard enough! In sobriety, we’re choosing to not use a drug that many consider essential to making intimacy happen.
Whether you’re already in a relationship or seeking one, this choice brings a lot to the surface. And by “a lot,” I mean issues, questions, feelings, and experiences that are myriad and layered.
We’re talking everything from feeling shy and awkward on a first date or in the bedroom…to facing un-anesthetized post-traumatic stress disorder from sexual trauma…to realizing you no longer want to be with a partner or spouse now that you’ve ripped off a booze-shaped bandaid.
Taking alcohol away doesn’t change underlying situations, challenges, or feelings so much as it brings them into focus. There’s no hiding or pretending anymore. There’s just us, here with our stuff, in relationship with others.
This place is powerfully honest, powerfully alive, and powerfully healing. It can also (at least some of the time) be really fucking hard.
This is where Tawny Lara steps in to save the day. Her forthcoming book, Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without the Booze, leaves no stone unturned or taboo untouched when it comes to dry dating, sober sex, and undrunk love.
She’s the Sober Sexpert you never knew you needed—naming common experiences, breaking down their energetics, simplifying the options, and offering wise counsel.
Dry Humping is straightforward, judgement free, and inclusive of diverse people in diverse stages and places of recovery and relationship. It takes topics that feel like a hot mess and untangles them—offering clear seeing, telling us what to try and what to avoid, and normalizing “the stuff we don’t talk about.”
While I’m more than three years sober and in a long-term relationship with someone 29 years sober, I still found the book highly relevant and highly useful. It will no doubt benefit that relationship and others, including with family, friends, and myself.
Reading Dry Humping, I felt as though I was in conversation with a caring friend and skillful coach. Tawny blends research-backed expertise, no-bullshit advice, and lived experience in a way that’s relatable, practical, and fun. She made me feel seen and heard on the page while providing clear teachings, plans of action, and quite a few laughs.
Personal Highlights
When reading a book like Tawny’s, I like to jot down personally relevant notes and reflections. This helps me retain, process, and practice with the material.
I thought I’d share them here—in a cleaned-up, review-y kind of way—to give you a sense of the book and how it’s helpful.
Dry Dumping covers dating others and dating yourself. As someone who’s partnered up but prefers solitude (to the extent that my spouse and I go periods living apart, each have our own bedrooms, etc.), I loved this. My dream self-date in sobriety involves a great coffee shop with spacious seating—one in which everyone is reading or working silently on laptops. I happen to be in such a place while writing this.
Tawny takes beautiful care when discussing body image and booze, sharing her own experience of body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) and highlighting the connection between BDD and alcohol use disorder (AUD).1 Unsurprisingly, many folks who struggle with BDD or other body image issues “outsource their confidence to liquid courage” (p. 21).
As a person in recovery from anorexia and still suffering from BDD, I appreciate how Tawny acknowledges and creates space for this aspect of recovery. Before getting sober, one of the “benefits” of drinking was feeling better about how I looked (until the next morning, when I definitely looked and felt worse thanks to alcohol’s toll on metabolism, skin, and sleep). Nowadays, I focus on the new and improved “after shot” that follows a night of not drinking. While that doesn't solve my body image struggles, it sure helps more than drinking did!
Tawny explains how, when we stop outsourcing confidence to alcohol, new possibilities and choices open before us. These choices include making changes that help us actually feel better about and more at home in our bodies. By reframing “body image” and focusing on taking care of ourselves and our health, we change the trajectory and create helpful rather than harmful momentum. This fosters true confidence—in contrast to fleeting, in-the-moment, booze-fuelled bravado that ends in guilt, shame, and less confidence than before.
Dry Humping addresses coming out as sober and coming out as queer—experiences which both hit home. As a queer, pansexual person, I appreciate Tawny’s recognition of the role of the gay bar in coming out and coming into fuller expression of self. I came out as queer decades before getting sober, but I can only imagine how much harder it would’ve been if those overlapped. When I first started dating and hooking up with women in my early 20s, “liquid courage” felt essential. I was living in Dupont Circle, D.C., and gay clubs were front and centre when it came to romance, sex, flirtation, and friendship. Tawny, who identifies as bisexual, gets this and offers excellent guidance on being queer outside the bar.
In certain ways, coming out as booze-free has been harder than coming out as queer. Since my partner is 29 years sober and I was still drinking when we met, I didn’t worry about breaking the news when I ditched the booze. (And I actually considered his sobriety a plus during our meeting and dating phase.) In other relationships, however, coming out as sober has been super awkward. Certain loved ones haven’t known how to respond and have a problematic relationship with alcohol themselves. As a result, my sobriety was relegated to “the things we don’t talk about.” Whether your situation is like mine and whether you’re coupled or not, Tawny runs through the pros and cons of coming out as sober in various ways, including putting it on your dating profile, telling them in real life, and telling them via DM, text, or phone call.
She also walks through sample conversations and ways it could go—from defensive and making it about them…to freaked out…to supportive…to indifferent. Her examples of common responses and how to handle them are spot on. They also offer a fantastic teaching moment for folks unsure how to support someone in sobriety.
Lest you fear sober dating and relating are all about deprivation and rules, Dry Humping is full of ideas for keeping things interesting, exciting, and fun. Tawny discusses various ways to pregame without booze, offering options for when you want to feel confident, relaxed, or energized. She also shares a line-up of booze-free date suggestions and conversation starters—including for first dates and for when you’ve found the one(s).
Personally, I wouldn’t date anyone who drinks—not because I think I’d relapse, but because I find what alcohol does to a person’s personality a major turn off. For folks like me, Tawny provides great ideas for meeting people who don’t drink.
On the other hand, for people who are sober and are dating someone who drinks, she walks us through that scenario and discusses communicating boundaries and identifying deal breakers. She also identifies signs that you shouldn’t date a drinker and what to do if you’re already dating or in relationship with one (including what to do and not do if their drinking is a problem). For example: DON’T argue with a drunk person (or a person who’s been drinking at all, in my opinion). It will not end well, and you will not be heard.
I loved Tawny’s exploration of emotional sobriety and how getting sober is about far more than giving up a substance. Someone might quit alcohol, for example, but remain full-on addicted to anger, complaining, shit talking, and negativity as a default mode of being. Same pattern; different drug of choice.
Throughout, Tawny is helpful without being preachy or presenting one-size-fits-all solutions. When discussing the distinction between vulnerability and oversharing, for instance, she offers sample scripts and suggests “instead of this, try this.”
For those who, like me, find knowing the science of what alcohol does interesting and supportive, Dry Humping has you covered. Using simple, accessible language, Tawny tackles biochemistry and what booze does to our bodies and minds.
Notably, alcohol is a depressant and impairs our ability to feel any kind of pleasure—including sexual stimulation. People often miss this because alcohol lowers inhibition. Problem is, you won’t be able to feel the good stuff at the same intensity (whether in the bedroom or anywhere else).
Speaking of sex, an entire section of Dry Humping is devoted to it! As a Chinese Medicine doctor, I was especially intrigued by the survey of alcohol-free aphrodisiacs, including foods and herbs but also “emotional aphrodisiacs” specific to you and what turns you on.
And, if you think sober sex is boring, don’t miss Tawny’s tips for sexual liberation without booze. She discusses toys, foreplay, engaging the senses, asking for what you want, and perhaps even building a sex room.
She also offers wise guidance for navigating trauma and PTSD without numbing and dissociating with alcohol—including the therapeutic role of cannabis in some cases. Tawny approaches this delicate, potentially divisive topic with great care, plenty of nuance, and research-based backup. She’s not, in other words, advocating replacing alcohol with weed.
The final section centres conscious coupling and what a healthy relationship even looks like. As with the book as a whole, the advice here is applicable to far more than romantic and sexual relationships. Tawny talks us through clear communication and alcohol-free arguing—including how to fight (what to do, what to say, what to avoid).
She also covers surviving a breakup without booze—something I desperately needed amidst divorce, when “wine with dinner” became the one bright light in my day. Interestingly, I now have visceral aversion to the thought of drinking when things get hard. Alcohol is the last thing I’ve wanted lately, amidst some very tough, very painful news.
Tawny’s suggestions for rough times feel perfect: engaging in intentional distraction (which is wholly different from mindless numbing), turning heartbreak into art (writing, for me), and identifying the pain with as much precision as possible (including what’s behind the feeling…and what else…and what else).
Dry Humping, while winding its way through difficult topics and places of challenge, ends as it began—in a place that’s uplifting, inspiring, and full of possibility. Tawny makes a case for cultivating a courageous love life in sobriety, shows us how, and cheers us on. Turns out, dating and relating without the booze aren’t only doable, but better.
To close on a personal note, Tawny is such a genuinely kind, supportive, and engaged member of the Substack (and SoberStack) community.
Her presence on this platform no doubt mirrors how she shows up elsewhere and is a true blessing in these hyper-connected-yet-disconnected times. You can support her work and service by ordering Dry Humping here.
Congrats, Tawny! Thank you for your writing and way of being in the world!
With love,
Dana
P.S., Everything on Sober Soulful goes behind the paywall three weeks after publishing. Get full access here:
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The term alcohol use disorder (AUD) allows for first-person language (i.e., calling someone “a person with AUD” rather than “an alcoholic,” which conflates the person with the substance and condition). It also acknowledges the spectrum of alcohol use and abuse, and contributes at least a little less to the false dichotomy between “alcoholics” and “normies.” More generally, Dry Humping includes “Say What?” call-out boxes that explain such terminology in straightforward, judgement-free language.
I’ve been sober for a little over a year, and my partner and I parted ways at the beginning of it for reasons. Both he and my therapist led me to believe that I was a total weirdo for dreaming of having my own bedroom while still being in a relationship. Thank you for sharing about that part of your life. It made me feel more normal.
Dana, this review means the world to me! I truly appreciate the thoughtfulness and generosity of this rave review. You truly *get* what I I'm trying to do with this book, which feels incredibly validating. Your feedback on the cannabis section also felt reassuring as that's the one section I'm most nervous about. I also appreciated learning more about your recovery story. So cool that you and your hubby have separate bedrooms and spend time apart. I love learning about different relationship dynamics. Hope to hug IRL some day soon!