the weird hopelessness at the heart of lust: sober celibacy — "they like omit to tell you…"
they like omit to tell you that after that year’s gone by you’re going to have forgotten how to even talk to a girl except about Surrender and Denial and what it used to be like Out There in the cage. Gately’s never had sex sober yet, or danced, or held somebody’s hand except to say the Our Father in a big circle.
Context
One of the theme's most exact accountings of what sobriety costs. The first-year no-relationships suggestion, meant to protect early recovery, has a consequence AA omits: by the time the year is up, the recovering addict has no life or language outside the program — Gately can talk about nothing but "Surrender and Denial and what it used to be like Out There in the cage," has never had sober sex or danced or held a hand except in the closing prayer-circle. The "weird hopelessness at the heart of lust," gazing at nonaddicted B.U. girls he has no way to reach, is the loneliness recovery builds: getting clean has walled him inside the only world that kept him clean, and left him fluent only in the vocabulary of the Disease.