I had a female drinking buddy once. . and we moved it into bed and it was nice for a few months (two naked bodies and a bottle of champagne is a nice combo) but then it went way bad.

She lives a few blocks away from me now and every time I go over there, she plies me with alcohol. . .*smile*. . .

ah rainbaby. Yes, I know exactly the relationship whereof you speak, and I'm sorry for your loss, because even when you haven't been close to someone in a long time, it's still a blow and a shock.

You have to be a little bit in love with people you regularly get fucked up with, I think.

Wino, Hugh Janus, tennessee sam and joe famous?

*shudders*

(sorry about your friend. been there, it sucks)

To go back to this - I've had male drinking buddies and female ones and I pretty much inevitably always end up in bed with the male ones and/or fall in love with them and it rarely ends well (although, granted, clearly no relationship I'm involved in ends well, the only surety is that they end and fucking quickly, too) although I do have a couple of male friends where we weathered that particular storm and went on to be actually even closer, better friends afterward. There is love involved in a drinking buddy, maybe because there's something about massive quantities of alcohol that binds people together in a unique way. There's a social component that just isn't there in other drugs with the possible exception of some of the hallucinogens: spending the weekend on massive doses of windowpane out in the woods makes for some pretty heavy bonding as well. IIRC. Or it may just be that our culture tries to wrap us all up into categories so that we differentiate too hard between friend and lover and family and so on and alcohol, which is good at breaking down boundaries, kicks those out of our heads at least on a temporary basis.

This last month has been one of the hardest if not the hardest of my entire life and I've been thinking a lot about this; where family ends, where love starts, where friends become family and vice versa. I've been blessed in my life by having a lot of really good, really close friends (most of whom, given my own predilections, have been drinking buddies at least once or twice) but sometimes that in itself makes for terrible complications. And then when three of them die within four weeks, well.

Oh, mygothlaundry and rainbaby, I'm so sorry for your losses. I also once had a "drinking buddy". She dated a guy I had once dated (I'd since gone on to marry my ex husband), and we were all still friends. After they broke up, she and I still stayed friends. Once, and this will sound strange, we even rented a motel room. She had a Polaroid camera, and we took pictures of each other in various states of undress and lingerie. We had such a great, funny time!
But her drinking went out of control. She was actually banned from her favorite bar because she took off her bra whilst standing at the bar to give to some guy she was trying to hook up with. I warned her about the path she was choosing (she was several years younger than me), but she chose not to listen. She lost a couple of nanny jobs due to her weekend partying, and got another job in Virginia. I found out, weeks after it happened, that she went out drinking to celebrate her birthday, and while driving home she was hit by a truck. I wish I'd had a moment to patch things up with her. I still miss her.

Ah, that sucks. A drinking buddy, which is close to but not the same as a drug buddy, is damn hard to find. Which I don't really understand, since most people seem to like drinking, but so few will commit to a regular schedule of it. Or they only want to go late in the night, when a good drinking buddy should be up for drinking right after work, before dinner.
Still, sorry for your loss.

People who fall between friends and lovers: drinking buddies.

Well, duh. If they wouldn't drink, they wouldn't fall.