I didn’t look like the classic, dying, after-school-special anorexic. At least not with clothes on. I just looked very thin. One or two people took me aside and told me I looked gaunt and was anything wrong? But 99 percent of the people I saw and worked with every day told me I looked amazing and asked what my secret was.

Throwing up. Starving. Exercising compulsively.

I loved a good anorexic joke and usually initiated them, like saying after a great dinner, “I’d better run home and throw this up.” We all laughed; my girlfriends said similar things. But I was actually going home and doing it.

What began as an online flirtation with Hugh quickly deepened. My usual cynicism fell away as we got to know each other, spending hours on the phone. When I traveled to Chicago for work, he sent a bottle of wine to my hotel room. I came to depend on him, albeit long distance. When a close friend died, it was Hugh I called, in tears and nervous, before going “onstage” to deliver the eulogy.

About a month in, Hugh asked me on an official date and booked a trip to New York to take me to dinner. In the weeks before, I barely slept. It wasn’t love yet, though. For our first date, he took me to a fancy Italian restaurant in the Village, and I ate. Pasta, wine, even a bite of dessert. It was one of the best meals of my life, and for the first time in as long as I could remember, I didn’t think about what the food would “do” to me. I didn’t think about throwing up. I just had a good time.

The next morning we had breakfast. I ate that, too.

After Hugh left, I went back to starving, and three weeks later I was on a plane to see him in L.A. I ate then, too. In fact, the only time I ate normally was when I was with Hugh.

This was starting to feel real. Hugh was unlike anyone I’d ever met — loving and expressive, but also tough and brave, and honest about mistakes in his own life: a brief, regrettable marriage, a bout with depression. It didn’t compute to me.