Over the next few weeks, Steve and I were inseparable at meetings, although he failed to move things along to the mauling-me-after-hours stage, preferring to talk earnestly to me in hospital conference rooms and Quaker meeting houses. This made me feel needy. Did he actually like me, or was he just doing his steps? Was his old duffer of a sponsor poisoning his mind against me? Were the other alcoholic chicks always rushing towards him in the kitchen with tea towels seriously going to get their teeth punched in? What if he was a 'thirteenth stepper,' always out to bang the newcomer? I wouldn't mind if he was.

In fact, why wasn't he? Gambling your sobriety over a fellow alcoholic in recovery is as old as recovery itself. One recovery website even has a forum topic devoted to thirteenth-stepper pickup lines. But I'd received none of these advances.

With the Steve path possibly leading only to a melodramatic relapse, I took to perusing dating websites, trying to light up that dusty bulb in my head with a bit of worthless excitement. I rewrote my profile three times, veering wildly between Jenny Tucker, diabolical boozehound and Jenny Tucker, puritanical bore.

But really, what kind of man was going to want to date me? What were we going to do, meet for afternoon tea? I might as well ask them where they want me to dump my baggage. More to the point, how do you prevent your brain from short-circuiting in the middle of a date and letting the reptilian part order a Long Island Iced Tea while the prefrontal cortex is distracted with simpering?

At AA (unlike the real world), you're told that alcoholism is a disease, not a moral failing. I felt like I had a disease, all right. Walking down the street in a surreal bubble of sobriety, I felt like I was harboring some exotic tumor that nobody knew about. Then there's the spell of mourning: you've lost your one true love, the bottle... and as for the next real person who comes along: you'll never be able to get wasted together. How do you like that?

It turned out my disease wasn't catching, because after nine months of confusing friendship that often left me in despair, Steve wrote to say we were both on our own journey (this is the recovery version of "it's not you, it's me") and that he could only be my friend — graciously serving me my abandonment issues on a doilied plate. I broiled alone in my unreasonable anger for a week. You're supposed to help 'the alcoholic still in need.' That's me, by the way.

A girlfriend who's a devotee of He's Just Not That Into You, The Power of Now, etc., etc., offered her interpretation. "The universe has sent you someone who doesn't want to fuck you, so that you can learn to be friends with a man," she lectured. (Although this was the same lady who'd shrieked, "You don't want to meet someone at Alcoholics Anonymous! They'll be an alcoholic!")

I was forced to admit she was right. It was tempting to scream at Steve, "You'd go for it if you were drunk!" But deep down, a profound, committed friendship was what I craved, and if sex were in the equation, the internal voice screaming "Next!" would soon screw it all up.

In Steve I'd met someone I could understand: someone for whom life frequently wasn't fair. On our anticlimactic dates, puddles rushed to meet his sneakers, while a woman who shot him a dirty look when we squeezed past her in a restaurant earned his seething resentment for the rest of the evening. He was plagued with gloomy bouts of self-doubt, only to slingshot into sentimentality at the drop of a hat.

But he had also had the guts to pivot his life around, despite all the ridicule from his football buddies and cost in meaningless sex that would entail. He shared his secret thoughts and fears, wide-eyed as a possum, and trusted me to reciprocate.

So if the only physical contact we'll ever have is the time I opportunely rubbed myself up against him when leaving a crowded cinema, then by golly, I'll treasure that memory as dearly as cooking sherry on a chilly night. Here's to your good health, Steve.