LITTLE DID I KNOW when I was assigned to the fourth floor of Eliot House that my love life was doomed.

The fourth floor, I thought: A bit of a climb, but a great view of sunsets over the river to make up for it. And everybody knows that heart rises.

I could already picture cozy winter evenings, nestled up in front of a roaring fire with my sweetheart.

We would feed each other marshmallows and hot chocolate and not feel so bad about having scaled all those stairs to get there.

But as any resident of the fourth floor or higher can tell you, it just doesn't work that way.

I noticed this depressing phenomenon even before I actually moved in. My boyfriend called the second week of September to find out my room number and when I planned to return to school.

I told him the fourth floor of K-entry, and added sweetly that any help hauling up our heavy couch/rug/futon/army trunks would be greatly appreciated.

He fled to the Cape before my plane had even touched down at Logan. He didn't come back for four days. Coincidence? I think not.

But even after my roommates and I finished dragging all the furniture up and he had finally ventured up to the room, things were never quite the same again.

He never just stopped by anymore. When we met for dinner in Eliot, he called up from the Centrex phone in the Breezeway to ask me to meet him downstairs in the dining hall.

And he started eyeing other women--women who lived on lower floors.

Within a week we had broken up. Bear in mind that this relationship had lasted almost nine months--during which I lived on the SECOND floor.

Call it fate.

Call it the post summer "I guess we're not destined for each other after all" blues.

I say it was those four flights of stairs that killed our romance.