By the time Ian and I met, I was finally so thin. Sometimes I wondered if being that thin was wrong (a thought I doused in alcohol). Ian was fun and grabbed my behind in bars and wanted to sleep with me. We were dating exclusively before I even noticed, and I was in love with him before I had realized how well we fit together.

Another person’s comfort with you can make you forget your discomfort with yourself. We went to bars and got only pleasantly drunk, ate butter popcorn at the movies because it was fun. We started making small accommodations for each other: Moving my gym routines for more time to be together. Eating a second dinner because he texted unexpectedly and wanted to see me that night.

Those butterflies were a pretty distraction — until I gained a little weight. Then the creeping insecurity and self-loathing came rushing back, threatening to overwhelm the comfort of this new relationship.

I told the therapist who had seen me through all of this — who had listened to me skim over the bad breakup and make jokes about my body and who wasn’t at all surprised to learn about my vermouth dinners and drunken purges — and she gave it a name: “This is an eating disorder. You have an eating disorder.”

That’s when I really plummeted. One night, when I was so depressed I couldn’t get off the floor, Ian came over to pick me up. My therapist told me to stay at Ian’s apartment for the week as an alternative to inpatient. I spent mornings on the floor in a corner of Ian’s bedroom, swaddled in a comforter, wailing because I couldn’t speak in complete sentences anymore and my brain — my beautiful, Harvard-trained brain — wouldn’t work right. One day Ian’s roommate heard me crying and was never comfortable around me after that. I don’t know if I blame him.

Eventually I got better. I had to. I would have been useless otherwise. I found drugs that helped. I ate more and kept it down. Ian didn’t leave me, because he thinks I’m the most sensible person he knows. That’s one of the nicest things I’ve ever heard.