Why Jennifer Garner Started To Worry About Her Daily Wine Habit
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“I’m amazed how much better I’ve been feeling about myself,” Garner said of her decision to take a break from drinking alcohol
I don’t spend much time looking at what celebrities do on social media. That is unless they talk candidly about problem drinking, in which case, they’ve got my full attention.
Over the past few months, I’ve written about how Chrissy Teigen and Jessica Simpson have helped challenge the stigma around alcohol addiction by opening up about their sobriety. And now actress Jennifer Garner has joined the conversation, albeit from a different perspective, and I’m all for it.
Earlier this month, Garner hosted an Instagram Live session with her friend and co-star Judy Greer from 13 Going on 30, where the pair discussed their respective relationship with alcohol. Holding onto artisanal teacups, the two actresses explained their decision to become “sober-ish” by choosing to take extended breaks from drinking.
For the most part, their chat is fairly jovial — neither Garner (49) nor Greer (46) suggest that alcohol had a destructive impact on their lives.
And yet, their conversation struck me as fairly radical.
That’s because of Garner’s revelation that she worried about her booze intake, even if she wasn’t hitting the bottle all that hard. She admitted she’s never been a big drinker and developed a daily wine habit only after having kids with ex-husband Ben Affleck, who has recently opened up about his own issues with drinking. “I felt like I wanted that reward at the end of the night,” Garner said. “And it was just like that little sip that I would have […], and it felt like I’d earned it and deserved it.”
But when she did the math on how much wine she was consuming, she grew uneasy about the amount, especially when the pandemic hit. “If I have half a glass every night, and if my half a glass is probably really a glass, that’s seven glasses a week,” she said. “And say, I have two on the weekend, and then suddenly I’m close to ten glasses of wine a week.” That was enough to spark Garner’s concern about increased cancer risk.
And so, she stopped drinking for ten weeks, during which she listened to quit lit audiobooks, including Sober Curious by Ruby Warrington and Quit Like a Woman by Holly Whitaker.
And while Garner’s experiences with drinking didn’t mirror those of the authors, she revealed that taking a break from alcohol improved her mood. “I’m amazed how much better I’ve been feeling about myself,” she said. That’s not to say she’s going to give up drinking forever. “I’m just figuring it out,” Garner said. “I’m going to have a new relationship with it post-pandemic.”
That anyone can choose to take a break from alcohol, regardless of the amount they’re drinking, should be common sense. But, unfortunately, it’s not, and Garner’s decision will strike many as strange. Disingenuous, even. You might be thinking, She’s lying about how much wine she’s having, nobody gives up alcohol after drinking so little.
And, sure, we would all do well to apply a healthy dose of skepticism to celebrity Instagram updates, including this one.
But still, I don’t see a reason to distrust Garner. That her explanation may come across as odd or lacking has less to do with her and more to do with the fact that, as a society, we believe that people don’t voluntarily quit drinking unless they’ve developed a serious drinking problem. A glass of wine a night, you say? That’s nothing. Now, what would be problematic is not having that glass of Pinot (or three) every night — at least according to the onslaught of wine memes in my Facebook feed.
This is even more true for moms due to the rise of mommy wine culture and the proliferation of marketing messages that promote wine as a prerequisite for effective parenting. As it turns out, not even celebrities are immune to the trend. As Garner puts it: “It feels like it’s become part of a code among moms like, Your wine oh my gosh you must be dying to have it!”
Given how normalized daily wine drinking has become, it’s not surprising that many people feel that it’s not socially acceptable to opt out or that somehow, the amount that they are drinking is not enough to justify taking a break. That’s an unfortunate misconception, affecting people who are having negative experiences with drinking but don’t identify as problem drinkers.“You can stop drinking without having a problem,” says Annie Grace, author of This Naked Mind, a book that Greer said helped her reevaluate her relationship with alcohol. “We can stop drinking before alcohol makes us hit rock bottom.”
As such, Garner and Greer’s conversation is unexpected and insightful, and I recommend watching the whole thing. But, of course, being celebrities, not everything they talk about is relatable. At some point, Garner talks about a time in her early career when she absent-mindedly bought a case of expensive wines she could barely afford. Do celebrities ever check how much things cost before buying them? Well, at least she didn’t accidentally order a $13,000 bottle of wine that she didn’t finish…
This article is part of my sobriety series, where I examine society’s relationship to alcohol, as well as my own. If you’d like stories like this in your inbox, consider subscribing to my newsletter on Medium.
