I have gone through periods of not wanting to attend AA anymore, many times it's because i feel i'm different to other alcoholics. Everybody has their own story, so we are all different i guess, but i have looked at the differences and thought i could do it without AA. I never went to prison, never went to hospital, never lost my drivers licence, never really liked vodka and never drank in the morning. So when i go to a meeting where these stories dominate, i feel different.
There have been a couple of times i didn't attend meetings for a while, but i always end up getting complacent and wondering if i could now drink like a gentleman. Those couple of occasions ended up with me not being able to control it, so always went back.
An old timer only recently said that to him AA is like two tracks, on the one side you have the program and on the other the meetings. He attends meetings as he is never going to hear those pearls of wisdom that are not in the Big Book, for instance someone said to me about something i was going through recently, ' move out of the problem and start living in the solution' ... something i'd heard before, but needed it at the time and would never have been reminded of that had it not been for attending a meeting. This old timer also said that he enjoys meetings to watch people grow, there's nothing quite like watching people grow in recovery and you'll never see it on the internet or in a book like you do in a meeting.
For a couple of years i only attended the meetings to meet like minded people, i guess that's the fellowship. I'm close to a small handful, not so close to others. There are always the idiots in AA, every meeting has them, but even they have the occasional pearl of wisdom which is why i go.
Maybe you're one of the lucky ones who can stay sober without meetings, i was told when stopping attending that if i ever felt the urge to drink again that the door to AA will always be open. When things are going well, I can miss meetings for a while and not feel like a drink, but i know there always come a time when i'm going through a hard time and that's when i need the meetings.
The key for me now is that if i do miss meetings for a while, or go through a period where i'm thinking they aren't for me, i will never rule them out for the future. I will never say never, as i know eventually i end up drifting back to the meetings.