IN 12-step confessional style, this is what love addiction did to my life: I dropped out of college, quit my job, stopped talking to my family and friends. There was no booze to blame for my blackouts, vomiting and bed-wetting. No pills to explain the 15 hours a day I slept. No needles as excuse for my alarming weight loss.

I hit bottom one sleepless night, strung out on the bedroom floor, contemplating suicide. And then I spent four months — and a good chunk of my family's money — in treatment for love addiction.

I know what you're thinking: Love addiction? Give me a break. Believe me, I've thought it, too. Even now, years later, I have mixed feelings about the term. But the facts of my experience — a relationship that utterly consumed my life, the magnitude of the depths to which I plunged before I sought help — are indisputable.

At the start our "new romance high" was unlike any I had experienced. Matt was my knight in shining Mercedes, courageously wielding his credit card as we bushwhacked through the malls of northern Virginia. We danced barefoot in the grass at a Harry Connick Jr. concert, and he surprised me with gifts from Tiffany cunningly stashed in the glove compartment. In Atlantic City we stayed in the honeymoon suite at the Hilton and in Florida had an ocean view from the Ritz. Day after day we lay in his bed with Sting's "Fields of Gold" lilting in the background.