Drinking Is Highly Contagious

"We know what you're doing Dick. The old ridiculous-headline-to-drive-traffic routine, eh?"

Err, not really, no.

New study finds binge drinking as contagious as the common cold

Do couples influence each other's drinking habits? Over a 28 day time frame, researchers were able to predict one partner’s binge drinking based the other partner’s binge drinking.

This study offers a unique explanation for why young adults are binge drinking: Because they are involved in a drinking partnership that promotes binge drinking.

This research shows your partner can influence your binge drinking — a finding that has important implications for assessment, prevention, and treatment.

See what they did there? You see, you always thought that you were harming no-one else but yourself if you chug a bottle of Pinot Grigio by the neck, when in fact you are brazenly inflicting your habit on your loved one. Or, say, you're a hazardous-drinking CAMRA pong-slobberer, your irresponsible habit is a danger to those around you.

“In some respect this is a cautionary piece of research. Pick your friends and lovers carefully because they influence you more than you think.”

One might even call it 'passive drinking', or something. I dunno.

This is a marvellous concept for extrapolating elsewhere, isn't it? Treated your lover to a box of chocolates on Valentine's Day? You're infecting them with the obesity bug. Hopeless romantic who likes to take your wife out for a rich, slap-up nosebag on a weekend? You artery-clogging bastard!

A bona fide danger to society, you are, and no mistake, to be avoided and denormalised at all costs.

Of course, the same applies almost everywhere. If you don't want to end up as a raisin-lipped, wizened old finger-wagging bore, don't listen to the type of shrill, interfering curtain-twitchers who produce pompous, nosy, rent-seeking, pre-determined policy-based junk like above.