We stopped drinking. What to say to a friend who sent us wine?

S.F. / Amherst

First off, congratulations! Maintaining sobriety during the past year is no small achievement. (And no shame to those of us who have not chosen to abstain.)

I assume you’ve already thanked your friend. If you know follow-up questions are coming, get out ahead of them and start the conversation before you’re asked. But first, put some thought into whom you’re giving the wine to, and why. If your old friend is also a good one, they’ll respect and support your healthy change of habits, and be happy for you. But no one likes to feel that their thoughtful gift has been offloaded like a surplus commodity. Don’t just foist the grape on the first tippler who comes to mind; share it in a meaningful way. If you’ll be hosting outdoor gatherings this summer, and are comfortable serving alcohol, save it for that. Or plan to give a bottle to each person whose home you visit once we can safely do that again. Give it as a housewarming gift to a friend who just bought their first place, donate it to an auction for a cause dear to your heart — you get the idea. You don’t have to drink the wine to treat it as a gift.

You might want to have the conversation over phone or video rather than text. Lately I’ve witnessed and experienced a serious uptick in people misreading or “miswriting,” and in all kinds of situations, between friends and strangers and colleagues. I attribute it to the mental and emotional fatigue as the pandemic hits its anniversary — and would be so curious to know if any readers have noticed the same thing!

A person I haven’t talked to for 15 years sometimes comments on my Instagram posts (“looks like a delicious meal!,” “cute cat,” or similar). If I ran into them in person I’d initiate a conversation catching up on everything that’s happened. Does the same etiquette apply on social media?

H.B. / Somerville

Do you want to do a 15-year catch-up? That is the in-person convention, as you say, but on the Internet it’s delightfully optional — in part because a person’s social media feed already contains a fair bit of the information one would typically exchange during one of those “Previously on … ” catch-ups. And in part, perhaps, because those 15-year retrospectives were never actually all that interesting. You either connect with who the person is now, or you don’t. If you don’t, you mutually, tacitly agree to float genially on the well-meaning, little-knowing periphery of each other’s lives. If you do, you’ll eventually uncover all that stuff organically, because you’ll want to.

Miss Conduct is Robin Abrahams, a writer with a PhD in psychology.