In my early 20s, I came to appreciate what it means to fall head over heels. He was erudite, aloof and utterly unattainable. Or so I thought. When he finally looked my way, my heart literally skipped a beat. But my good sense ran a mile.
The cracks began to appear not long after we started dating. I tried desperately to maintain the façade. After all, we were would-be actors and poets. Artistes, if you don't mind. Conflict and drama were par for the creative cause.
What I didn't know was the tawdry life he had been building for himself away from our little hub. He had resumed an old love affair — with heroin.
This erstwhile episode returned to me last week as I sat glued to the unravelling of US television actor Charlie Sheen, which came to a head yesterday with the actor's sacking from the high-rating sitcom Two and A Half Men.
But it wasn't the actor's meltdown, as much as the drama being played off stage by his close friends and family, that had me compelled.
Theirs is the story of making mistakes, underestimating the power of addiction and loving too easily, if not judiciously. A drama with no script or guarantee of a happy ending, but with all the sorry hallmarks of a sequel.
When asked about his 45-year-old son's battle, Sheen's father, Martin Sheen, seemed strangely ebullient. 'He's an extraordinary man,' he told Sky News. 'He's doing well.'
It was an odd reply in the face of what appeared to be an all-too public cry for help, but read between the lines of the 70-year-old's reaction and you will find the very real complexities of loving an addict.
If there's one thing about drug dependency it's that it has no mercy. Take a stroll through Sydney's Kings Cross or down Melbourne's Victoria Street on the days when heroin flows freely, and tell me the drug doesn't get under the skin of its host; leeching life as they once knew it, one needle at a time.
Addiction changes a person. In place of transparency you will find stealth, secrecy, desperation and dishonesty. Where there was once light and shade, there now lurks only the shadow of doubt.
And, yet, the person you love is still there, somewhere. But how to reach them? And what to say to them when — or if — you do?
In the 2008 documentary Ben: Diary of a Heroin Addict — one