The thing nobody tells you about quitting drinking is that your friendships will sort themselves into three categories without your needing to do anything. Some get stronger. Some stay roughly the same. Some quietly attenuate to almost nothing.
I did not consciously try to change any of these. The friendships did the sorting themselves, based on what they had actually been built on.
The friendships that got stronger
A small number of friendships got noticeably stronger after I quit drinking. These were the friendships that were built around things other than drinking. We had drunk together; we had also done many other things together. Hiked, traveled, worked on projects, had long conversations about things that mattered.
Once I quit, these friendships kept doing the things we had been doing, minus the drinks. The dinners continued. The trips continued. The long conversations continued, and got slightly better because I remembered more of them.
The strongest of these even adopted some of my new behaviors. Two of my closest friends quietly cut back their own drinking after I stopped. We did not talk about it explicitly. They just started ordering less, taking more sober weeks themselves, and our shared evenings shifted away from being structured around alcohol.
These friendships were the unexpected gift of quitting. I had not realized that the drinking had been doing some background work of obscuring how much I actually liked these people. Without the drinking, the friendship was clearer, and that clarity was its own pleasure.
The friendships that stayed the same
A larger number of friendships stayed roughly where they had been. We saw each other about as often. We did the same things together. The fact that I was no longer drinking was noted briefly and then absorbed without much change in the texture of the relationship.
These were friendships where drinking had been an accompaniment to the activity, not the activity itself. We went to restaurants where I now ordered sparkling water and they ordered wine, and the dinner was the dinner. We went to events together and one of us drank and one of us did not. The friendship was about the conversation, the shared history, the actual relationship. Removing my drinking did not remove anything important.
These friendships did not get noticeably better, but they did not get worse. They simply continued. This was the modal outcome for me.
The friendships that attenuated
A small but specific number of friendships attenuated to almost nothing after I quit drinking. These were friendships where, on examination, drinking had been most of what we were doing together.
We had met for drinks. We had gone out for drinks. We had texted about getting drinks. When I removed the drinking, there was very little left to do. The first few months I tried to maintain these friendships by suggesting non-drinking activities. Coffee. Lunch. Walks. The responses were polite and the activities happened a few times, but the energy was not there. Without the drink, the conversation did not have the same momentum. We ran out of things to say faster.
Within a year, most of these friendships had quietly drifted to the kind of relationship where you exchange birthday messages and otherwise do not really see each other. I am not bitter about this. We did not have a falling out. We just discovered that what we had thought was a friendship was a drinking arrangement, and when the drinking ended, the arrangement ended with it.
This was harder to accept than I had expected. Some of these "drinking arrangements" had felt like real friendships at the time. They were not. The drinking had been performing the function of a friendship, and without it the function was gone.
What this taught me
The lesson I take from this is that drinking is a powerful social adhesive. It substitutes for, and in some cases masks the absence of, the more durable kinds of connection. People who are not really compatible can drink together for years and feel close. People who are deeply compatible can do many things together and not need the drinks to know that they are close.
When you remove the alcohol, the substitutions become visible. The "we used to be so close" friendships that were really "we used to drink together regularly" friendships reveal themselves. The "we don't see each other much these days" friendships that were really friendships built on something more durable continue with surprising stability across long distances and gaps.
This is information. Not negative information about the friendships you lose. They were what they were; you just see what they were more clearly now. Negative information about the assumptions, the assumption that all of your close friends were close because of something you had together. Some were. Some were close because of the drinking. The proportions are usually surprising.
What I would tell someone starting
If you are about to quit drinking and you are worried about your friendships, the honest answer is that some will sort themselves out and you cannot predict in advance which will fall into which bucket. You may be surprised, in both directions. The friendship you thought was deepest may turn out to have been substantially drinking. The friendship you thought was casual may turn out to have been much more substantial than you realized.
Do not try to control the sorting. Just keep showing up to the things you would have shown up to, with sparkling water instead of wine, and let the friendships demonstrate what they were actually made of.
The ones that get stronger will more than compensate for the ones that fade. That has been my experience and the experience of most people I have talked to about it. The total social fabric, by the end of the first year sober, is leaner but stronger.