Thanks for your interest. Actual comments are more valuable to me than upvotes, to be honest. Upvotes are a dime a dozen, non-bot comments are rare.

Anyway, yes.

I dated an anorexic for four years, and it was hard work to learn how to talk to her the right away. It's very difficult to talk to someone like that and not fuck it up. I had to control my words, my tone, my intonations, my phrasing, you name it. It got easier as the trust got stronger, but still.

Every person is different, but of course people with these types of disorders share a lot of similarities. What I did was simply never commenting on her looks. She was very beautiful, so every compliment she ever received had to do with the fact that she was the most beautiful girl around in any given situation.

I wanted to give her something else to hang her hat on, so made it a point to regularly put over the fact that she was incredibly smart, caring, real, all that. I'd like to think it gave her other things to build her identity around that had nothing to do with her being skinny and pretty.

To this day, I actually still have this thing where I tend not to compliment the looks of anyone I'm interested in or dating. A learned habit. It still feels weird to do that.