Alcohol makes you do some crazy stuff sometimes, but few things are as embarrassing as drunkenly calling or texting the exact person you’d least want to speak to when your judgment is seriously impaired. If you’ve ever slipped up and drunk-dialed someone you really shouldn’t have drunk-dialed, here’s what you can do to ease your embarrassment:
- Try to remember exactly what you said. It might make the vomit rise in your throat to think about what you said on the phone last night but you’ve got to do it. You’ll want to block out the hazy memories, but it doesn’t always work. No matter how much you tell those memories to GTFO, they’ll keep coming back to you until you deal with what happened.
- Figure out if you actually do anything wrong. You need to work out if the nature of your drunk-dial is something you can laugh off or if you said something you need to apologize for. Calling up the guy you’ve been seeing and flirting between hiccups isn’t so bad. Calling up your ex and cursing the day he was born probably warrants an apology.
- Test the waters. If you’re not sure how the lucky recipient of your drunk-dial felt about it, then you’ll want to try and get an idea by sending them a text despite your groggy morning-after voice. If you’re lucky, they might have just forgotten about the whole thing, and you can throw a celebratory party because you’re in the clear (minus the hangover).
- Laugh it off. If you called up an ex (obviously drunk), but all you did was ask how he was doing, you might be cringing because you don’t want him to think you miss him. But it’s really not that bad, so don’t go making a big deal out of it. If you treat it as nothing and laugh it off, he won’t even care that you called him.
- Apologize if you need to. If you think you said something you need to apologize for, then get a second opinion from a close friend or six. If they agree, then just suck it up and apologize, especially if you want to maintain a friendship with your ex or you don’t want to put off a new partner  with your drunken antics.
- Be honest. It may have been bad but it’s easy to forgive somebody who admits their mistakes. What else are you going to do — pretend you still would’ve called your ex a douchecanoe if you were sober? The recipient will know the truth, so there’s no point in hiding the fact that you were plastered.
- Get a few things off your chest. If you drunk-dialed somebody to give them a piece of your mind, it’s doubtful that your rants were entirely comprehensible. So you might want to apologize and admit you shouldn’t have said the things you did, but explain where you were coming from. Hopefully you’ll both come away from the experience feeling a bit better.
- Forgive yourself and forget about it. It’s easier said than done, of course, but don’t forget that alcohol plays with your emotions. Your drunk-dial probably seems ten times worse than it actually was. You’ll have forgotten about it by the time you’re throwing down shots again next weekend.
- Make sure you don’t do it again. If you want to make a concerted effort not to get so drunk next time then that’s up to you. If you want to avoid a repeat, there are things you can do to minimize the chance of you committing the same mistake again. For example, you could ask a friend to keep an eye on you and stop you from drinking and dialing.
- Block and delete. If your ex hasn’t blocked you on all forms of social media already, then you should take the initiative and block him or at least delete his number from your phone if you think that’s the only way to stop this mess from reoccurring. It might be painful, but it’s something we all have to do at some point after a breakup.
