Relationships

Your Partner’s Drunk Texts to Their Ex Aren’t Nothing, According to ‘Give It To Me Straight’

January 22, 2026

If your partner is drunk texting his ex, you’re not “crazy” for feeling weird about it. You’re clocking a pattern—and patterns rarely lie. Maybe they swear it means nothing. Maybe they say he was just drunk. Maybe they promise it won’t happen again. But if it keeps happening, your gut is probably trying to tell you something your heart doesn’t want to hear.

On Give It To Me Straight, hosts Alexandra Madison and Jon Bouffard get brutally honest about what drunk texts actually signal in relationships—and why “it was just because I was drunk” isn’t the reassurance people think it is. Whether you’re in a long-term relationship, pregnant, or just tired of decoding mixed signals, this one hits uncomfortably close to home.

Those texts aren’t random

Here’s the thing about drunk texting: alcohol doesn’t create feelings out of thin air. It just lowers the filter keeping them in. Research published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking found that drunk texting is directly linked to emotional regulation difficulties—meaning when someone can’t process their feelings sober, they reach for their phone (and their ex) after a few drinks.

“Drunk emotions come out, feelings come out,” Jon says. “Do with that what you will.”

And honestly? He’s not wrong. When someone’s sober, they can pause, think, and choose not to hit send. When they’re drunk, that pause disappears. So the question isn’t why did they text their ex? It’s why is their ex the person their brain runs to when the guardrails come off?

Because if it were truly nothing, it wouldn’t keep happening.

That’s the part people don’t want to admit. Drunk texts aren’t random. They’re usually the thing someone’s been thinking about—but knows better than to say out loud. And as Jon points out, this isn’t early-twenties chaos anymore. “You’re not f*cking 20…you would not be doing that as a husband, as a future father.” In other words, messy behavior hits different when you’re building a real life with someone.

The ‘he’ll change when we’re more committed’ trap

If you’ve ever told yourself that moving in together, getting engaged, or having a baby would finally make the behavior stop—you’re not alone. But you might also be caught in what psychologists call the sunk cost fallacy: the idea that you stay not because something is working, but because you’ve already poured so much into it.

At some point, walking away feels scarier than staying. So you start bargaining with the future. Maybe the next milestone will fix it. Maybe this level of commitment will finally make him take things seriously.

Alex reads a listener’s story that sits right in that tension. She’s in a long-term relationship, pregnant, and her partner keeps crossing “emotional boundaries” by texting his ex—the woman he was previously married to—whenever he’s drunk.

View this post on Instagram
A post shared by Jon and Alex (@giveittomestraightpodcast)

“I’m just sad that this…has come up multiple times over the years, that you didn’t walk away from this relationship before having a baby with this man,” Alex says. Because the pattern didn’t start with the pregnancy. It didn’t suddenly appear after things got serious. It was already there—just easier to explain away when the stakes felt lower.

And as Alex emphasizes, “I don’t know that this man is going to change. He hasn’t proven to you that he is. So I think all that we could say is best of luck in this relationship until it snowballs into something more and then you do decide to leave.”

The three questions that cut through everything

When you’re spiraling trying to decode what their texts mean or whether this time will be different, Alex says “keep things simple” and ask yourself, “Is he making you feel good? Is he putting you first? Is he prioritizing your feelings? No. No. No. Bye.”

That’s it. No complicated analysis required. If the answer to those basic questions is consistently “no,” the relationship isn’t meeting the bare minimum—regardless of how much history you share or how badly you want it to work.

Sometimes the clearest path forward is the most obvious one. You don’t need to wait for rock-bottom proof or some dramatic final straw. If the pattern keeps repeating and they’ve shown you who they are, believe them.

For more insights, tune into Give It To Me Straight, streaming now wherever you get your podcasts.