"A 30-day diary study examined the relations among trait self-esteem, negative romantic relationship interactions, and alcohol consumption. Multilevel analyses revealed that people with low trait self-esteem (compared with people with high trait self-esteem) drank more on days when they experienced more negative relationship interactions with their romantic partners. In addition, daily increases in state self-esteem buffered people with low trait self-esteem from the desire to drink in response to negative romantic relationship interactions. These findings suggest that people with low trait self-esteem may drink as a way to regulate unfulfilled needs for acceptance."
DeHart et al. (2008)
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The causality is interesting here. they refer to this issue in the paper. another possibility is that some arousal mechanism leads to arguments, drinking etc.,
"On a related note, the causal relation between negative relationship interactions and alcohol consumption may be more complicated than the one we have described. Because alcohol consumption was assessed in vivo and events and state self-esteem were assessed during the evening, determining the precise temporal relations among these variables is complicated. For example, a skeptic may argue that increased drinking by low self-esteem participants caused them to interpret their negative relationship interactions more negatively. There are three reasons why this alternative explanation seems unlikely. First, there was no significant main effect between drinking and negative romantic relationship interactions suggesting that people did not report more negative interactions with their partners on days they consumed more alcohol. Second, we reanalyzed our data looking at the number of negative interactions participants reported with their partners instead of their rated severity of the interactions, and we observed the exact same pattern of results. Finally, the difference in amount of drinking reported on high and low negative relationship days for participants with low self-esteem was 1/2 of a standard drink. Although a meaningful increase in alcohol consumption, this increase presumably is not enough to bias participants’ perceptions of their relationship interactions. Together, these findings suggest that the moderate amount of alcohol our social drinkers are consuming is likely not biasing their perceptions of the severity of their negative relationship interactions, especially for low self-esteem participants."
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