My problems started when I joined my college drinking society. I would drink a couple of times a week pretty heavily, come home in the early hours, be knocked out for the rest of the day and then hit the pub with the lads the next night. My girlfriend has told me that the big nights have to stop; she is fed up of me stumbling in at 4am, apparently singing football songs and dropping Gardies everywhere, but surely it’s my life and I can socialise how I want to? I am worried about what it is doing to our relationship, and to my work. What would you advise?

I once received some wise advice from a secondary school maths teacher who had studied at Oxford a few years back. Before I left to attend Cambridge, she told me: “at university, you need to understand that you can only balance doing three of the four S’s: sleep, socialising, sport and study.” Now, many seem to maintain a lifestyle based upon three of these, but you seem to be struggling to keep up with certain aspects of your life under the pressure of your raucous social antics.

However, it is good that you have pinpointed the cause of your own problem. Your social life is based on the bottle, which is not a healthy way to maintain your body or your friends. And no matter how righteously independent you feel about declaring that “it’s my life and I can do what I bloody well want”, remember that you equally can’t have everything. Shouting about your own independence before crawling into bed with your girlfriend after a night out is definitely a way of sending out mixed messages.

If you love her, don’t walk in whilst she is sleeping, shout drunkenly at her (spilling cheesy chips on her in the process) and then fall asleep in her bed and snore for the rest of the night. Relationship 101: not cool.

Minimise the nights out to once or twice a week. Try not to drink until you drop. Instead, use one of these nights to go to the pub, but shake it up a bit by making it a challenge to only have a couple of beers. Play a board game. This isn’t about punishing yourself: this is about proving to both you and your girlfriend that you don’t need alcohol to have a good time.

In case you missed Becca's last column on befuddled finances, read it here.