One cold November night, my husband and I arranged to get together with a couple we adore.

The plan was to meet at their house for appetisers and drinks. Betsy would be there when we arrived. Mark was due home at 7pm, when we would walk to a restaurant down the street.

We rang their bell at 6pm. As usual, Betsy had prepared a generous spread of food as well as an array of wine: a sauvignon blanc from New Zealand, a dark malbec and a pretty peach-coloured rose.

John pulled out a bottle each of club soda and grapefruit juice and Betsy's face fell.

"Oh, are you guys still not drinking?" she asked.

Despite my husband's cheer, I was on her side. Our nearly three-month experiment with abstinence had improved our health, sleep, mood and marriage.

But socially? It had made us one big, collective drag.

We quit because of me. At 51, I was suffering from a mean and constant perimenopause. Insomnia, depression, fatigue, heartburn, body aches, skin problems, itching.

I had tried everything: hormones, herbs, soya, magnesium and acupuncture. Then, a one-week trial of not drinking confirmed what I had feared. Without alcohol, everything got better.

Indigestion? Gone. Sleep? Vastly improved. Skin? Amazingly clear and better hydrated. Mood? Stable and light.

I stopped drinking in late August. My sweet husband gave it up two weeks later.

"Go ahead. You can drink without me," I told him. But he shook his head.

"It isn't fun anymore," John said.

I worried he would get resentful. But it didn't happen. Instead, he lost 8kg, stopped snoring, began studying a foreign language and reduced his intake of reflux and blood-pressure drugs.

We are not purists. John often has a single drink at a business function because it's easier than explaining why he doesn't drink.

I had a glass of champagne at a friend's bachelorette party. We each drank one perfect glass of pinot noir on our anniversary.

But we are not tempted to fall back into old patterns because giving up daily drinking has improved nearly every area of our lives and the days we don't drink just feel so good.

So, what's the story? Blissful as we may be in our 97 per cent sobriety, who cares? Well, our friends do. Because we are now terrible guests.

Let's go back to the night of that casual dinner. We ate a bit and chatted for an hour about work, kids and ageing parents. Around 7.05pm, Betsy checked her phone.

"Oh, shoot, turns out one of us got the time wrong," she said. "I guess Mark won't be home until 8pm."

She went to the kitchen to pour herself another glass of wine and John and I shot each other alarmed looks.

The house was cool - the way we used to keep ours - but this was Minnesota. Without the flush of alcohol, we were freezing.

Our glasses held only mushy pink-tinged ice. We also were starving, but knew from experience that our capacity to eat had shrunk. One more helping of cheese and olives would make us useless by dinnertime.

When Betsy returned, she took one look at us, our wan faces and stony resolve.

"I'm really sorry about this, guys," she said, looking miserable. "I don't know what happened. I must have read his calendar wrong."

Which is unacceptable. Because at any time before this in the multi-year history of our friendship with Betsy and Mark, we would have shrugged off the delay and held out our glasses. She was not responsible for the fact that John and I had changed.

I wish I could say we rallied, that I asked for cups of hot tea with honey and entertained Betsy and my husband with some amusing anecdote from work.

Instead, I sat shivering and picking at a cracker until Mark walked in at 8.15pm. Then, we grabbed our coats and walked through an unfortunate sleet to the restaurant, where blessedly, we were served within 15 minutes. With the first few bites of real food, I felt life return.

Then, John and I went home and rehashed the no-alcohol decision. Should the world have to deal with us sober?

If Mark and Betsy were our only drinking friends, we would drink with them, once or twice a month, and the rest of the time, we would live our clean, club-soda life.

But we are surrounded by wonderful, warm people who drink often and hard. My career is in advertising, so I have cultivated folk who get their juices running with a Bloody Mary at 10am. John is from a family that buys whiskey by the handle.

We love our festive, storytelling, always-up-for-a-celebration crowd. If we drank with all our friends and relations who do, we would quickly be back to old habits.

I would be the cranky, queasy, dry-mouthed, hormonally addled menopausal mess I was before.

So, the answer, we decided, is that the responsibility lies with us. We have to be flexible, good-natured and better prepared.

One fix is to invite people to our place instead of going to theirs: We can make sure there's alcohol on hand, but also plenty of non-alcoholic options for us.

We also started talking to friends more about why we weren't drinking.

I was so depressed before, and now, I'm not. I am able to sleep for the first time in years. This is not a moral decision. It is a medical one, like my husband's decision to avoid shellfish because the iodine can make his throat swell shut.

I am not recommending that everyone stop drinking or saying abstinence is a panacea for menopause. We're still a little awkward at parties. And we're prone to go to bed at 10pm.

It is simply a reminder - mostly to myself - that friends are not responsible for accommodating your lifestyle decisions. Their understanding is nice.

But ideally, you make your personal choices, carry them out with confidence and try not to disrupt the small pleasures of the people around you.

When everyone is sitting around the table, it doesn't matter what's inside the glass in your hand.

WASHINGTON POST

• The writer is an American novelist and essayist.